Boarding School Shenanigans

I was sent to Boarding School in the last two years of High School. I think it was because my school marks weren't great and I was hangin' with the wrong crowd - the groovy, scruffy, surfy crowd. You dig what I'm sayin'?

So to boarding school I went. Boarder Mistresses were generally hideous and mean. The food was ordinary - though at Boarding School I developed my love for Shepherd's Pie.

Religiously, I had Jam Sandwiches everyday for lunch. You had to order your lunch (on the morning of any day which you wanted sustenance at about midday) on a brown paper bag.

I liked to leave helpful safety messages for the kitchen staff ...

(These are reconstructions of my lunch bags for dramatic purposes. Not the original lunch bags)

You find amusement any way you can, at Boarding School.

After I left Boarding School, Occupational Health and Safety records reveal that there was quite a dramatic spike in easily-preventable accidents in the school kitchen.You tell me why that was?!

 This was my 'cubicle' in the Grade 11 Dorm. Just like home, really.

On the weekends it was hard to find things to do at Boarding School. 

Many girls smoked in the showers. I didn't. Some 'snuck' into town. I didn't.

 This was our 'Head Boarder'. She would inspire confidence in us all 

and remind us how much we loved Boarding School.

Our Boarding School was quite old. The school started in 1920. Its main building was used as a war hospital for the Americans during WWII.

My favourite thing about the Boarding School was that it had two old lifts. You know the type, with the manual sliding doors - one 'external door' of wood and glass panels to see the occupants, and then an 'internal' concertina grill which kept the occupants in the lift as it rises from floor to floor.

The lifts at the Boarding School were 'off limits' - one was the main lift which we were allowed to use at the start and finish of every term so that we could bring our luggage to our dorms. The other lift was exactly the same as the large lift, but it was "the Nuns'" lift. It was much smaller (could fit about four adults in it) and it was DEFINITELY out-of-bounds being in the 'closed-off' section of the Nuns' area.

 This is another Dorm. Doesn't it look like fun?

The "Nuns' lift" however went straight up to (Heaven? No.) the Grade 11 dorm on the top floor. It never stopped on that floor because boarders were never allowed to use it and, as much as I hoped they would, no nun rode the lift to the Year 11 dorm to read us all a nightie-night story from the New Testament.

Anyway, one boring weekend me and two other boarders, for some reason, decided we'd catch the "Nuns' lift". Just for a laugh.

No one was around. The Boarder Mistresses were nowhere to be seen .... but we had to be careful because the lifts made one-hell of a racket which I swear you could hear throughout the school.

 These are Boarders lining up to get fed. I found being a Boarder was akin to being 

a second-class citizen or a 'tenant' in residential rental terms.

So, at the bottom of the school near the music room, into the "Nuns' lift" we got ... . It was cold and scary and quiet.

We shut the the wooden door and then shut the grill, pressed the top button and slowly began to rise. The lift made a cranking sound as it rose between the floors ... Floor One ... Floor Two ... and then, jerk.

STOP!

The bloody thing stopped between Floor Two and Three, in the out-of-bounds Nun's area! Shit.We were trapped. From inside the lift, I could just see over the wooden floors of Floor Three, and somewhere below us was the ceiling space of Floor Two.

The lift wouldn't budge. We couldn't afford to be caught by nuns stuck in their lift, because I knew no one who'd caught the Nun's lift and I couldn't begin to imagine our fate if caught.

One of the girls I was with started laughing hysterically - she was from Papua New Guinea and she had had malaria.

We opened the doors and all tried to scramble, and haul ourselves with our bare fingernails out onto the wooden floor of Floor Three. But it was too high for us to get our knees up onto the Floor. And we were too high up to jump out onto the Floor below. So we were stuck! Tight. Like three school girls in a confessional box.

Then the hysterical girl from Papua New Guinea lost all control of her bladder. Resulting in a big pool of urine in the corner of the Nun's lift!

(She often wet her pants at inopportune moments. She told me her doctor said she'd stop wetting her pants once she had babies. I still can't work out the physiology of that cure for incontinence. And, when one is stuck in a tiny lift with two other 16-year-old Catholic girls, having babies seems a long-way off.)

It couldn't get any worse. And she wouldn't stop laughing, and then she started hopping about trying not to stand in her wee.

Then, from down the hall, I was sure I could hear the sound of Rosary beads being scooped-up and then the squishy-padding of rubber-soled, flesh-coloured Homypeds making their way towards lift to see "What the Goodness!" was going on.

We slammed both lift doors shut, ever wary of the spreading pool of bodily fluid, and started punching at the buttons hoping the old lift would start up again.

Come on! Come on!

Finally, thank God! Something like a gear crunched, and the lift lurched back into action and began slowly rising towards the Top Floor. When it stopped at the Grade 11 dorm, we pulled open the doors, we poured out, wee poured out, and we ran for it!

Fin!