My Old School - Extract 4

This one's for Bill, who is inexplicably enjoying this series (The story so far - at the age of 11, I have spent my first night away from home at Boarding school - now read on) The next shocker for me was the sound of a hand-bell being rung vigorously at 7am the following morning. The door was kicked open (no door was ever opened in the conventional ‘turn the handle and push gently’ manner) and one of the Chiefs intimated that we had twenty minutes to have our beds made and get ready. Get ready for what? How unprepared I was for boarding school life. This was entirely different from my mother wakening me gently at 8am, with a cup of tea and some toast. I had until then never made my own bed in my life. We had 20 minutes to get up, get washed, get dressed and make our beds etc and, needless to say, failure to comply with this timetable attracted summary punishment. One thing it took me ages to get the hang of was that your bed had to be made in a particular way (i.e. hospital style). I had never made my bed before and I had never been in a hospital so how the f**k I was meant to know what to do is beyond me. However, the swishing of a red flash sandshoe coming into contact with your buttocks at very high velocity is a tremendous teacher and I soon learned. On that first morning I struggled along as best I could consoled by the fact that we'd soon be seated at breakfast. Not f***ing likely. Another rude awakening awaited. Having got myself ready with a minute or so to spare I was innocently musing as to why anyone would want to get up at 7am. What for? School didn't start till 9am. What are we going to do between now and then? Maybe there will be so much to eat at breakfast that we need an exceptionally long time to digest it all. The answer came as a very rude shock indeed. I was informed that we were to make our way to "Orderly". Orderly what? What the f**k is "Orderly”? Where is it? One of the other boys in the dormitory approached and advised me that I was to accompany him to the Art Block. I should say a few words about this boy because he made my life miserable for a long time. His name was H and he was from X. H was in fact in his second year at the school, but had somehow contrived, in a class of intellectual pygmies in the previous year, to be so incredibly backward that he required to repeat first year. It should be apparent already that requiring to repeat a year at an academically limited school like ** is an indication of density bordering on the supernatural. However, the big plus factor for H was that having already spent one year at ** he was wise to the system and knew the ropes. He didn't have the hassle of being homesick. He wasn't wondering what ‘Orderly’ was. To give him credit, it was an advantage he ruthlessly exploited while it lasted. Anyway, I trooped off to the Art Block with the bold H. I have to digress here to observe that the Art Block is no longer there, courtesy of a guy whose name now escapes me, inadvertently (I think) dropping his cigarette butt in amongst some papers while in there for a fly smoke, resulting in the Art Block being burned to the ground. The offender had been expelled and had left the school before the flames were even out, though he made an imaginative and valiant but vain attempt to save himself by mumbling something about “it must have been spontaneous combustion, man.”. The 20 Sovereign and book of matches found in his jacket pocket did not assist his cause. What a glorious day that was. We spent our time dancing like dervishes with unrestrained glee outside the building as the Fire Services fought bravely but unsuccessfully to control the blaze. The deep intense pleasure was comparable only with waking up on the morning after the January gales in 1970 to find that many large oak trees had been blown over during the night and one had by divine intervention cut the English teacher's estate car in half. Oh, joy!! Anyway, to get back to day one in the Art Block. H informed me that I had to sweep the classroom floors first. There were two classrooms in the block. As it happened, since this was the first day of term the rooms were reasonably tidy, but I had never handled a sweeping brush before and H expressed a good deal of displeasure on this score, comparing me to a number of useless objects of his acquaintance. After issuing his instructions as if he was a Sergeant Major, he went off to take up his own duties, which apparently consisted of reading a comic and picking his nose. Sorry, to be strictly accurate, H looked at the pictures in the comic - "reading" it would have put too much of a mental strain on him. These onerous duties must've had some religious significance for H, because as far as I knew, he performed them every day. After sweeping the floor I required to move all the desks and chairs to one side of the room and then get down on my hands and knees and apply a horrible sticky liquid floor polish manually to the floor by means of an old rag which nominally passed for the polish applier (very possibly the same one which was used to clear the dining-room tables). The floor itself was lined with linoleum and it was a cardinal rule of the "Orderly" that any passing Fascist thug (Chief) should be able to view his jack-booted reflection gleaming back at him from this surface. To that end every day of my first year I was down on my hands and knees spreading this thick semen-like substance onto the floor. Of course, the stuff got everywhere and you could have seen your reflection in my kneecaps. Having done the easy bit of applying the floor polish I then handed over to H for the heavy-duty part of the double act. Enter H with the "buffer". It's difficult to describe this contraption if the reader has never seen one. It was a sort of huge shoe brush on the end of a swivelling pole that enabled the user to swing the brush end over the floor surface to "buff" it up. Hugh conscienti­ously discharged his duties by swinging this buffer enthusiastically till the requisite gleam appeared on the floor. I longed to have a shot at buffing and I sometimes asked Hugh if he would like a go at applying the polish. He simply looked at me as though I had made an indecent suggestion and told me to f**k off. Of course the first day at orderly turned out to be a positive dawdle compared with what followed. You can probably guess why. Since this was the Art Block, when I turned up for ‘orderly’ the next morning I found that the place looked like the aftermath of a rocket attack on a paint factory. It seemed that, not content with making an unholy mess of the canvasses on which they were meant to be painting, the various creepy little budding Van Goghs who inhabited the block during the day had turned their collective attention to the walls, floor and sinks in the classrooms. I suppose that this was all some attempt at post-modern surrealism, but it was a right pain up the arse if you were the poor bug**r who had to remove a Pre-Raphaelite collage which had been daubed on the wall by some juvenile Picasso. Some smart c**t had gifted a Potter's wheel to the school. They should have made that bas***d clean up the mess which his benevolence caused. I never saw anything even remotely resembling a vase or anything like that emanating from the Art Block, but I did see plenty bits of hardened clay roughly hewn into the form of female anatomical parts strewn liberally all over the bloody place. Of course, H took all this in his stride. Well, he would, wouldn't he, since his job was "buffing" and that couldn't take place until the mess had been cleared up by yours truly. H thus had plenty time for Beano reading and nose picking. Since he had already done a year, H acquired a wholly unjustified pre-eminence in the first four months or so of our first year. Since he knew how everything worked, sucking up to him was a necessity, since among other things he was responsible for picking the rugby and cricket teams to begin with. This was because he was generally the only person who had any previous knowledge of how to play these games. The irony of this was that it turned out that apart from being terminally stupid, H was also congenitally incapable of playing any game even half decently. And yet he was the captain for f**k sake. I'll never forgive the bas***d for not picking me for the cricket team on the sound tactical basis that he hated my guts.