"BLOODY HELL, there sure are some blowflies hanging around these toilets,” said Young Dud to an older boy standing beside him at the urinal in his dormitory on his first day at boarding school.
“Yeah!” said the older student. “It’s best to go to the toilets around lunchtime.”
“Why?” asked Young Dud.
The older boy just grinned; “Because they’re all up in the dining hall hanging around our food then.”
BLOWFLIES aside, with the modern world seemingly obsessed with MasterChef, fancy cookbooks and posh hatted restaurants, it is important not to forget the thousands of kids sitting down for meals in dining halls at boarding schools this week after their long holiday. They eat a unique cuisine that is never mentioned in the cooking shows.
“For what we are about to receive, may the Lord give us cast iron guts,” said one of my fellow prefects in front of a packed dining room before our last meal after enduring six years of boarding school food. It had to be said. The teachers’ table collectively gave him a death stare, while the students burst into spontaneous applause. His irreverent Grace had neatly summed up the sentiments of everyone in the dining hall.
IN fairness, we did better than many other schools because we lived on a working farm with a dairy, poultry sheds, piggery and large vegetable garden. But it was more the lack of food rather than the quality that was the greatest cause for dissatisfaction. Fit, healthy, active, sporty, growing boys, constantly craving more food. We could all empathise with young Oliver Twist when Dickens wrote those immortal lines known to every kid who has ever attended a boarding school; “Please Sir, I want some more.”
If we were ever foolish enough to say we wanted more, the Matron, in true Dickensian spirit, snapped, “don’t complain to me about not getting enough food, there’s plenty of bread and jam on the table.”
When she was wearing her nurses’ hat, the Matron’s other famous quote to anyone struggling into her sick-bay with a gaping wound or life threatening ailment was; “If you are healthy enough to get yourself here, then you’re healthy enough to go to school.”
No wonder we called her the Old Dragon. But I have digressed.
WHILE our dining room wasn’t as bad as other institutions, it is unlikely many of us ever knowingly ordered banana custard or scrambled eggs when we stepped out into a wide world of fancy restaurants after leaving school.
It was those scrambled eggs I couldn’t come at - pale, incipit, runny things made from some sort of egg concentrate. I developed a phobia about them and even though my good wife Barbara cooks lovely scrambled eggs, laid by our own chooks, I still momentarily think back to those horrible runny white plates of slop at boarding school.
Another nightmare was prunes. We hated them, but one lad we christened ‘Rotten Guts’ always ate all of ours, the whole table allocation - almost sixty prunes at a sitting. You can imagine why we called him Rotten Guts.
The custard was a classic with its solid crust holding the sloppy mess together. The ultimate party trick was to delicately attempt to pass the custard container right around the table up-side-down. Now that’s not something you see on MasterChef.
BUT it is the humble potato that is indelibly etched in my vision of food at boarding school. It was held in such reverence, that every meal we ever had revolved around variations on spuds. When Francis Drake first brought a potato to England he couldn’t possibly have imagined what the ladies on our kitchen staff were going to do to it later on. Sometimes potatoes were deep fried whole in old recycled fat, which wasn’t too bad actually. On other days potatoes were quickly boiled, mashed in water, then served, lumps and all, with frankfurts or snags - thank God they gave us tomato sauce. Occasionally, potatoes were just peeled, boiled and served whole, with a dollop of gravy and some tinned beans. What a treat!
SO WHEN you are next watching MasterChef or dining at a fine restaurant, spare a thought for the kids returning to boarding school this week. They won’t be having a ten course degustation with chicken liver parfait, oak moss and truffle toast or salmon served with artichokes and trout roe or snail porridge washed down by a selection of ten fine French wines.
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