Wednesday 1 August 2012

School dinners

I expect my primary school had the best of intentions when it came to feeding its pupils at lunchtime, it being late 1960s/early 1970s Britain, a time and place where meat, potatoes and two veg were the school dinner staple, and fast food hadn’t yet made its entrance as a daily diet option.  There were certainly no cold choices, nor cheese strings, burgers and crisps on the menu.

The canteen with its wobbly-legged tables covered in sheets of blue PVC, and little chairs (colour coded for size with a red, green or blue spot), was a noisy place between 12 and 1pm as 200 children aged between five and ten were herded in to get our plates of lumpy Shepherd’s Pie and bowls of gooey Rhubarb Crumble.  We drank lukewarm tap water from lightweight, slightly dented beakers, possibly made from titanium, in not-quite-shiny gold, silver and – if you were lucky – pink.  There were far fewer pink ones than gold and silver and so they took on some kind of special status, making the water in them taste just that little bit better.

Dishing out the servings from behind the hatch and taking away our empty plates (as well as supervising at playtime) were the Dinner Ladies.  Some were surly and authoritative, others kind and maternal.  We soon knew which ones to turn to and which ones to avoid.  Mrs Bird was one of the ones who’d give you a cuddle if you fell over and got those little bits of playground grit embedded in your freshly grazed knees.  I can still remember every detail of how she looked: tall and slender, she had dyed hair the colour of copper piping which she backcombed up in an elaborate and outdated beehive, wore a gold letter M around her neck and the shortest skirts I’d ever seen on anyone not on TV.  We loved Mrs Bird.  Whereas Mrs Cann...I can see her hard, lined face now, her sallow complexion and her pencilled-on eyebrows resembling wasp antennae, several dozen shades darker than her hair... no, Mrs Cann was not the kind of woman you'd get - or want - a cuddle from.

Unfortunately Mrs Cann frequently made my dinner times a source of great stress.  She was a stickler when it came to checking that we’d consumed everything on our plates.  “You mustn’t waste it” was the motto.  Under her watchful eye we felt forced to swallow every last crumb.  However, we also learned that there were cunning ways to make it look as if you’d eaten more than you had.  The easiest way was to smear your leftover bits of hard mashed potato and bullet-like peas around the perimeter of your plate, making sure to leave a nice, clean space in the middle.  There was quite an art to it.  Or you could make little piles out of the mushy sprouts and watery carrot slices and hide them skilfully under your strategically placed knife and fork.  Alternatively, you could just be a messy eater and  drop half the contents of your spoon onto the table or floor.  But I had an additional problem.  It wasn't just a few last mouthfuls of boiled cabbage or a burnt pastry crust I wanted to leave - I didn’t want to eat any meat.  This wasn't something that was ever taken into account at my school back then.  The feeling was that everybody had to eat meat; in fact, didn't everyone want to eat meat?  There was no saying "no" to it.  I spent most of the morning dreading dinner time, and most of the afternoon recovering from it.  Occasionally I’d be relieved to find there was Macaroni Cheese or Egg & Chips on offer and lunchtime would be a breeze.  But most of the time there were meaty things – flabby, greasy sausages, grey slabs of lamb, unidentifiable brown chewy lumps in brown slimey sauce.  I’d ask for the smallest portion I could get, then spend the entire mealtime finding ways to avoid having to swallow it.  If the smearing round plate, hiding under cutlery or dropping onto table ruse didn’t work, I'd put it in my mouth and then conveniently ‘cough’ it into a hanky which I’d shove back in my pocket.  It would stay there leaking gravy or fat into my pleated skirt until playtime, when I'd drop it nervously into one of the deep wire bins, dreading that one day I'd get caught.  I don't know what I thought would happen if I did, but in my head it would be a punishment just too awful to contemplate.

Only the lovely Mrs Bird was sympathetic.  If she was on duty I could always ask her if it was okay to leave some food on my plate, and without fail she would nod kindly, and maybe wink one of her pastel blue-shadowed eyes, as she discreetly took the gristly remains of my dinner and scraped them into the slops bin.  To this day I don't think I've experienced a more reassuring sight than that of the long-legged, beehived Mrs Bird in her mini-skirt, walking away from me with my plate of uneaten liver and kidneys.


17 comments:

  1. I luckily went home for dinner most of my school years. One year I went to the grammar until it shut I hardly remember it but know I did not like the food at all. Also being all boys school we never got someone like Mrs Bird sadly ;-)

    Wasn't that the housekeeper in Paddington bear?

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    1. I'd forgotten that Mrs Bird was indeed the housekeeper in Paddington Bear - don't think she looked much like this one, though!

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    2. 50 shades of bear... hey that isn't bad lots of undertones to it (My cousin Kevin!), I should use that :-)

      Sorry this comment is rubbish - head rush!

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    3. It's that '50' theme of yours again, that's what's doing it!

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  2. Excellent C.

    For us it was a double whammy...not only was the food horrid but it was alien. It was yankee food...Southern vittles aren't massed produced. Of course they called it lunch. So, while we ate cold fried chicken and greens for dinner at the house...we had mystery lumps and squares for lunch at school.

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    1. Thanks, e.f., that must have been strange for you, but I love that: "mystery lumps and squares" - sounds about right. Oh and I had to look up 'vittles' - that's a nice word!

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    2. At least the ladies were sweet. There was always a Mrs Cann type scowling around the kitchen but the one's who dished the stuff out were invariably big round black women who called us Baby.

      They didn't have to be stern...it's an echo from an older time but, even now, black women of a certain age are not crossed or sassed. 'Course we all, black and white, had our manners beaten into us by the time we got to school.

      I'm in and out of those places a lot...peddling the same yankee bilge..ChiliMac!?!? Nothin's changed.

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  3. Good for you and your noble stand against the carnivores! Your post has brought back a pile of memories. Perhaps perversely, even though most of my school dinners were clearly terrible, I actually have reasonably fond memories of the stuff. My mum was never much of a cook, so this might explain it! (Sorry, Mum). My fondest memories are for odd things like Chelsea buns covered in runny pink custard (WITH the skin!mmmmm!); pizza made from hunks of thick Mother's Pride or similar; spam fritters covered in grease (I was not a vegetarian in those days, unfortunately); Spotted Dick again drowned in custard; salads that always consisted of a half a boiled egg, shredded carrots, boiled potatoes and (ahem) beetroot in some kind of jelly(!); also Manchester Tart, which I have never ever seen anywhere else other than on a school pudding dish. Good times! Haha!

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    1. Hi SB, great memories! You've just brought back another for me too - PINK custard! I'd completely forgotten about pink custard, but yes now I think back we had it too (though not on Chelsea buns which sounds like an interesting combination). I've never heard of Manchester Tart (at least not in the sense you mean...) Favourite pudding of all was Chocolate Cracknell... that sticky, chocolately, cornflakey square of sweetness was the best thing ever and made up for all the other culinary horrors.
      Have to say too that the difficulties I encountered re. not eating meat at primary school were thankfully not continued into secondary school. There they actually catered for special diets and as a result a small handful of us odd ones got the best meals ever, individually cooked, carefully thought out and usually delicious - my meat-eating schoolfriends were invariably jealous as hell.

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    2. Manchester Tart = thin layer of pastry on the bottom, very thin layer of jam and thin layer of slightly hardened custard on the top. Everything had to have custard on it somewhere. Not sure about any previous encounters with Chocolate Cracknell, though I am very fond of Sarah Cracknell!

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    3. Chocolate Cracknell is just as lovely as Sarah Cracknell! And I think I might be partial to a a little bit of Manchester Tart too, even though that doesn't sound quite right ;-)

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    1. Thanks - always have loved that track!

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  5. I well remember slicing through my allocated layer of pink custard to get to the anonymous dry sponge beneath it, hoping desperately that there might be a thin layer of cheap jam to lubricate it on its journey down my throat...oh how I hated school dinners.

    My senior school was a convent, so the torment really ramped up a few notches there when it came to 'clearing one's plate'. Sadistic nuns with their foul yeasty breath, leaning over us while we chewed and chewed and chewed at lumps of grey gristle in a vain effort to avoid choking on them... I'm so surprised we didn't all develop eating disorders as a result.

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    1. That sounds so awful. What is it about those sadistic nuns we so often hear about? Primary school dinners might have seemed traumatic but I realise I was very fortunate at secondary school in that respect, in spite of all else I might have disliked about the place. No nasty nuns!

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  6. I lived very close to my primary school, so there was no real reason to stay for school dinner, but I remember badgering my parents endlessly to allow me to stay at least one time. They finally relented and come the day I excitedly filed into the hall at 12 o'clock with all my friends, sat down and waited.

    I was probably about 5 years old and had only ever eaten food prepared by one of my parents or Nan. A plate of something unfamiliar and unappetising was placed in front of me and immediately I knew that not all food was like Mum's! I took a mouth-full and reverted to my fallback mode at that age - I burst into tears!

    Mum was summoned to the school to remove her blubbering son. She took me home, I had my usual lunch and never mentioned school-dinners again!

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    1. Aww! It sounds as if it was just as well that you were spared any further dinnertime agony! (Perhaps they gave you Broccoli and Lettuce Surprise?)

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