The Tearoom Six
Kids are not to be trusted. Never forget that.
The reason I say this is because despite being quite a good girl at school, give me any job which included an element of trust and I would simply blow it. Especially given the presence of a buddy whipping me up.
Some key phrases seem to have had an almost chemical effect on me.
They were:
“Awww, go onnnn…”,
“C’mon Misssy, it’ll be a laugh”
And my all time button pusher,
“I dare ya”
In Primary Seven when I was 11 years old, each week a pair of girls would be on coffee duty for the teachers. Aside from flouting the laws governing equal opportunities in a cavalier fashion, (like, can boys not make a cup of tea?) it was a chance to get away from maths or somesuch bollocks 15 minutes early.
The deal was that two 11 year old pupils would make teas and coffees to order for all the school’s teachers, in the combination staff room/headmistress’s office. It was a quite a small school, so we’re really only talking about nine coffees… tops.
I could burble on about the teachers taking complete advantage of our child labour but really the week you were on “tea and coffee duty” was, in truth, a bloody great week.
At first, the casual vandalism was slight and unimaginative. One of us would maybe spit in the kettle or wipe a bogey in the jacket pocket of a less popular teacher, but pretty soon the whole thing got out of hand. Ahh, the addictive power of hysterical, wet-your-pants laughter.
Now, we never nicked anything, I want to make that much clear. Destruction and slow burning pranks were more our bag. Even when you were not on tea duty, you would wait to hear stories at playtime of the offences committed by your tea-making compatriots. We got away with it for months.
There was one particular teacher we didn’t like, Miss Mathers. Her nickname was “Muggy”, quite why I don’t know, but it suited her. She looked like a hippy with lank henna’d long hair, no bra, (complete with pendulous boobs like a Masai woman) a muslin collar-less shirt and floaty skirt. This outward appearance would lull you into a false sense of security. Outside she was a clean living version Janis Joplin; inside she was a dragon. She kept order in her class by simply screaming in the faces of kids to an extent that their hair would be blown back like in a cartoon.
Still she had never done anything to me, so why did I feel the need to fill her rubber mac pockets up with washing up liquid, when I eventually decided that spitting in them wasn’t going to be enough for me?
Bizarrely (OK predictably) , this was the prank that got us all caught and banned from the “privilege” of doing the teas. Which was sad really, because we’d had a good run.
As the six Primary 7 girls stood before the Headmistress, each not owning up nor ratting on one another (just like in Prisoner Cell Block H, we weren’t no “Laa-aagers”) we felt strangely cheated as the washing up liquid was one of the tamer things we did.
I almost felt like saying, “But we did much worse than that! C’mon! What about the pinhole in the student teacher’s condom that was in his jacket pocket? What about the prank phone calls from the Headmistresses desk? What about dead mouse smuggled in from home that we’ve put in the staff toilet cistern that you’ll only find out about in six months when you finally work out what that stench is??”
Never trust kids. Especially girls.
