Double or starve
One morning, the vice
principal came into the dining hall during breakfast when we had a bread bun
and fish stew served in an aluminium dish. He asked one of the boys if the food
was enough and the boy replied, “No sir.” That interaction led to the doubling
of our bread rations, from then on we had two bread buns rather than one.
Our dinner ladies or
cooks were of a different animal species, almost too well fed that they could
have been a crossbreed of homo sapiens and hippopotamuses for the way the
folds of skin at the elbows looked like armour cladding that you could not once
suggest they were fat even as they were built like stout brick houses, their
legs might have suggested elephantiasis, though none looked ill, and we were
scrawny and skinny like Jack
Sprat.
Weevils and vitamins
When we had beans
that nearly passed for diarrheal effluent fully augmented with weevils, that
became more of the protein content than the beans, you closed your eyes as you
spooned in the sustenance, maybe mixed in with garri grains. That we never fell
violently ill at what we were served was probably testament to a constitution
borne of being shipped off to hostelry by our loving parents to toughen us up.
The dinner ladies had
a side hustle of snacks and sweets that they sold to us, an escape from the
witch’s gruel and puddings of three-square meals that would have made Oliver
Twist think he was at the Ritz.
Gremlins of the dark
One night after
everything had quietened down at the dining hall and the kitchen, I was
invited by a classmate, and we found ourselves in the confines of the kitchen
pilfering goods we should never have had access to. The doors and windows were
bolted shut and yet we got in with ease.
The pots were placed
over holes, there were heated from recesses for firewood on the outside and so
whilst the food was cooked, the smoke was always outside. At the end of the day,
the firewood was removed, and the recesses cleaned of ashes and soot for the next
day.
Post the pots
We, the gremlins of the
night could go into the recesses and lift the lighter pots and that was how we
entered the kitchen, through the fireplace. How so criminal and soon the
novelty of that enterprise wore out, for the pang of conscience and probably
the realisation that too many gremlins were scavenging around the kitchen. Yet, I doubt Miss Marple would have determined how things were lost.
The thrill and the adrenalin rush of this naughtiness would have faded at the stroke of the first
landing of the birch on one’s backside, you never wanted to suffer the humiliation
of a morning assembly punishment and thankfully where one came a cropper, one was
spared the lasting indignity of such.
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Mischief I - Yikes! A snake
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Mischief II - The fundamentals of fluid mechanics
