My Old School (Extract 2)

The horror to which I referred earlier was the cry directed to me of "You're on stacking, ya wee bastard, hurry up and stack." This was the instruction to me as I struggled to eat my cold food with borrowed cutlery. "Stacking" consisted of stacking the plates and cutlery as people finished eating - you know, the kind of thing your mother does at home, and which at the age of 11 you’ve never given a moment’s thought to. 1st years were invariably the obvious "stackers". It was OK when it was something good for breakfast/dinner/tea, like fish and chips for tea for example, because the rest of the squad usually cleared their plates. However it was absolutely f***ing incredible when it was spaghetti bolognaise or macaroni or some other such dish where half of the squad who weren’t keen on this foreign muck would while away meal-time by indulging their passions for art nouveau, using pasta instead of paint, mixed in with the contents of a tea cup and a tomato ketchup bottle. They allowed their innovative artistic imaginations free rein on delicacies such as semolina and prunes or mutton curry. Another duty for first year boys to perform in the dining-room was "Jams". This was in many ways even worse than stacking. It was rare for the same person to be on "Jams" and stacking simultaneously, though it did sometimes happen, when one or other of the boys responsible was in sick-bay. The reason why the same boy was not usually on stacking and Jams at the same time was a purely practical one and had nothing to do with a desire to ease the burden on the poor wee 1st year pleb. (Historical note – on the model of ancient Rome, everybody under 4th year was considered plebeian, thus ‘pleb’ was the generic term for these creatures). No, the reason the stacker was not also simultaneously on ‘Jams’ was simply that the Jams person could not properly attend to his duties if he was stacking at the same time. To be on Jams meant that you were responsible for looking after all the personal jars of jam, marmalade, peanut butter, marmite, honey, syrup, cheese-spread, pickles, lemon-curd, coffee, horlicks, hot chocolate, coffee-mate, bovril, treacle and any other combination of mealtime drinks, condiments and all round sticky stuff which the members of the squad had purchased with their own money in an effort to make the school provender more palatable. And not only responsible for looking after it, but also responsible for producing same immediately on request at any time. Thus you had to lug about an old cardboard box filled with this stuff – that was your ‘jam-box’ and you had to be prepared to defend it against attacks from other ‘jam-boys’. Raids on unattended jam-boxes arose from those situations where a jam-boy had lost some psychopath’s raspberry jam, and was intent on ‘replacing’ it from elsewhere, to avoid having his head flushed down the toilet while the cost of the missing jam was extracted by force from his pocket or his hide. I digress for a moment to mention that one of the more inedible items of alleged food which was served up was what was laughingly referred to as butter but which was more accurately described in the parlance of the boys as "axle-grease". I've never actually found out exactly what these slabs of disgusting lard-like so-called butter were, but it was quite the foulest tasting stuff I've ever eaten, and it would not have surprised me to discover that the School had done a deal with a Tibetan peasant for a special duty-free, no questions asked, discounted delivery of three tons of yak's vomit. Certainly, Environmental Health and Food Safety were not such priorities in those days, but I’m very confident that the yak’s vomit would not have survived an inspection by the then sanitary inspector, if such a person had ever showed up – which he didn’t (although, God knows, I phoned them often enough). Almost without exception the boys preferred to eat bread without butter rather than imperil their health with this muck. I say almost without exception -- there was, inevitably, always the odd lunatic (see F above) who thought it was “quite nice actually”. A consequence of this was that on the occasions when the kitchens were fresh out of axle-grease and real butter was to be had, it was hoarded against the day when the Tibetan produce was back on the table. When butter was served, it was frequently in the form of those pre-wrapped single portion spreads of butter and the "jam-boy" was inundated with piles of these packages to keep in the "jam-box". Apart from the fact that it was impossible to tell whose butter was whose, it was also impossible to tell how long particular packages of butter had been in the "jam-box", except for the smell of rancid butter which occurred particularly during hot weather, when you'd find to your horror that marmite, marmalade, coffee and peanut butter jars etc were smeared in 18 month-old liquefied butter. Cue head down the toilet and forced separation of the jam-boy and any cash he might have. A never-ending problem for the jam-boy was the constant allegation that pilfering had been going on -- specifically that the jam-boy had been supplementing his diet with dollops of someone else's peanut butter. This usually manifested itself by some outraged squad member yelling at the jam-boy that the level of his coffee/syrup/treacle etc (delete where appropriate) had gone down below the point that he'd last marked it at the previous meal. The clear inference was that the jam-boy had helped himself to it. In fact no jam-boy would ever have been foolish enough to pilfer from his own squad's jams for fear of the potential drastic consequences, though it's fair to say that all jam-boys regularly pilfered from other squad's jam boxes, so I suppose the net effect was the same. (To be continued)