“Slowlly and majesticlly with gaint wing beats what shook the air Derik the blud draggon rose into the perple and red sky.” Cody’s story opening differs from Siobhan’s only in that hers describes a regular dragon called Hedwig and her spelling and punctuation is better. Siobhan is not entirely pleased about the obvious similarities but what can she do? Cody didn’t steal her words. Her teacher used them as a good example and he decided to “magpie” them.

Many primary schools no longer worry about children copying the work of others. Sharing the fruits of someone else’s labours isn’t cheating any more; it’s collaborating.

And in order to avoid the negative connotations associated with the term “copying” (or related words such as “stealing”, “pilfering”, “pirating”, “counterfeiting”, “thieving” and “plagiarism”), a new verb has been invented: to magpie. It means to appropriate the intellectual property of others in a spirit of educational good practice.

But is it morally acceptable? Imagine a sunny spring morning in the late 1960s, somewhere between the Summer of Love and Woodstock. A time when the motto of the younger generation was one of Peace and Love. Now imagine the teenage Steve Eddison walking to school. He has a song in his heart and something precious in his satchel. The birds are singing, the bees are buzzing, flowers are blooming, and all is right with the world.

A fateful encounter

And then he runs into Frank (“Tank”) Benson.

In those days it was probably safer to run into the path of a Morris Minor with inefficient drum brakes and an octogenarian with cataracts at the wheel than to run into Tank Benson. But he who hesitates loses.

Young Eddison misses his opportunity to dash across the road to safety and ends up being escorted to school by the Tank. It turns out to be a long journey. With patient good humour, Young Eddison tolerates all attempts to trip him. With a brave smile, he endures dead legs, a Chinese burn and being used to demonstrate the finer points of the headlock.

Even when his smallness is confirmed (by his person being picked up and deposited in a privet hedge), he maintains his calm.

Sharing the fruits of someone else’s labours isn’t cheating any more - it’s collaborating

It is only when Young Eddison refuses to hand over the copyright to his English homework that things turn nasty.

His class has been studying personification and their task had been to write a poem called “Storm”. And because Young Eddison is madly in lust with his English teacher, Miss Gorgeous, he has gone out of his way to create a work of literary genius that he’d rather not share with anyone; especially Tank Benson.

Ironically (and somewhat prophetically) Young Eddison’s “Storm” includes the lines, “A blustering bully, a thundering troll; muscular, mindless and out of control.”

Had magpie-ing been encouraged in the 1960s, Young Eddison wouldn’t have had to stand up to plagiarism. Miss Gorgeous would have recognised him as the true author, and things would have turned out all right

Unfortunately, his stand is short-lived. Soon he is lying on the ground, looking sorrowfully on as Tank empties his satchel, locates his English book, tears out the precious pages and throws the remains into someone’s rhododendrons.

Steve Eddison teaches at Arbourthorne Community Primary School in Sheffield