Page 4 - Billy the Cat and Katie

helped stop the war, maybe even shorten it by several years. His father had returned from the
war and was very determined to find a way to help British soldiers. He’d found that the army
had to face terrible problems but the worst thing of all was being wet. Often soldiers had to
cross rivers without bridges, sleep and fight in the rain and it was very hard to be a good soldier
when you are constantly cold and wet. You could catch terrible diseases and die from the cold
and so he was going to try and find a way to make the soldiers clothing waterproof while still
being able to fight easily. One afternoon he was working in his large shed which he liked to call
his inventing room. The table was covered in pieces of material cut up from the soldier’s
uniform and William’s father was carefully painting each piece of cloth with different liquids
from large glass bottles. Most of them labelled dangerous or poison. William watched through
the window as his father carefully lifted each piece up and pegged them onto a length of string
to dry. Just then his mother opened the shed door bringing a cup of tea and biscuits for them
both. William's father dropped one of the cloth pieces onto a metal tray containing some liquid
and there was suddenly a huge cloud of smoke in the shed. Both William's parents ran out and
all three of them waited for the smoke to clear. It took quite a long time and as they waited
they ate the biscuits and drank the tea. William’s father looked through the window into the
shed and saw that the smoke had cleared and they went in to see if there was anything left of
the cloth pieces.

Strangely enough the shed didn't seem to be damaged at all and the piece of cloth that had
fallen into the tray of liquid seemed to have soaked up every last drop of whatever was in the
tray. Not only had the cloth piece sucked up every last drop, it had also changed colour and
seemed as though it had become smooth and shiny as glass but now it was as black as coal, not
khaki green as it was before. William's father pulled at the edges and the material stretched like
rubber but the strangest thing of all was that it didn't take any effort at all. The cloth had
changed into something else and when let go it returned to its original size and shape. He tried
to cut it with a large pair of scissors but try as he might he couldn't make any kind of cut in it at
all. He tried to push a very sharp penknife through it and the material seemed almost to push
back against the sharp point of the blade. It was getting late and William had school the next
day so they all went back to the house for dinner. William had a bath after dinner and then it
was bedtime. He wondered what had happened to the cloth piece and drifted off to sleep. Over
the next week William's father spent almost every minute of each day examining the cloth
piece pulling, stretching, hitting, trying to cut and stab it. William was returning home from
school on Friday afternoon after a particularly busy day of maths, PE, geography and history
and was just walking towards the shed when suddenly he heard a loud bang. It sounded like a
gun being fired but who was firing a gun in his father's shed? William rushed to look through
the window as his father had always told him not to open the shed door without being told that
it was safe. He could see his father had set up a rifle on the long bench at one end of the shed
and at the cloth piece was clamped to a large wooden block at the other end of the shed.

His father saw William peering through the window and smiled to him, waving for him to come
in. He looked very excited and William was astounded when his father told him that despite
firing a rifle bullet at the cloth piece it hadn't gone through, in fact it hadn't even marked the
surface or damaged the wooden block behind. During the day his father had tried to cut, stab,