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School Dinners


Gus Mears

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I have very little memory of going to primary school but one of the few things I never seem to forget was my mum's first attempt at a packed lunch. It was like half a buffet crammed into a Real Ghostbusters lunchbox. I have this horrific memory of the other kids having a jam sandwich and an apple while I'm sitting there trying to work my way through sandwiches, Hula Hoops, scotch egg, Fiendish Feet, grapes, apple, snowballs, Tunnock's wafers, with a beast of a dinnerlady stood behind me trying to hurry me along. Don't know what she was thinking I was about six.

Big school was a different story. If you could avoid getting your lunch money stolen by the kids from Dangerous Minds in year 11, it was brilliant. It was when everyone was off beef so the school got creative with burgers. The turkey burgers they did were incredibly to the point that I'm not convinced it was turkey. And they had lamb burgers that were basically a circle of doner meat in a bun. Heaven. You'd get there as early as you could, stuff your pockets with burgers and then get down for a good spot for One Bounce. Run by the vending machine for a Twix on the way back to classes. I don't remember them serving anything but chicken, turkey or lamb burgers and cheesy chips.

My school was going through a rebuild while I was there and I was in year 10 before they opened the new canteen which was fucking depressing. It was like a supermarket cafe. Microwave jacket potato or packaged sandwich meal deals. Shit.

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I always remember the time in primary school when Paul Totty, after eating a fine pudding of chocolate concrete and pink custard, proceed to puke up all over our table, it went onto most people's plates but I've never been able to shift the image of pink custard vomit floating atop of my plastic glass of water.

 

Wednesday was chicken pie day, a personal highlight, I can still remember the smell. I also put my lifelong dislike of parsnips to being assured by a dinner lady that they were roast potatoes. They sodding well weren't.

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Packed lunches all the way. Primary school dinners were eaten by the rough children and looked like they'd already been eaten. Served by some miserable old trout in Diedre glasses on those trays with compartments for your 'meal'.

Got a bollocking from a dinnerlady with one front tooth for eating my yogurt instead of my sandwiches. 

Middle school consisted of trying dinners for two days before reverting back to the trusty chocolate spread sandwich. 

High school, I didn't ever venture into the canteen.

Now I work in a secondary school and it's all paid on cards. Bacon and cheese paninis, pitta pizzas, fajitas, a shitty nandos ripoff (called quirky bird), curry, Bolognese, potato wedges, tortilla chips and dips, sausage rolls... Ergh.

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Fucking Hell, my primary school was stuck in 1960s compared to most of you lot.

Dinner was in the hall at 12:00 sharp. 8 kids to a table, two of which (from year 5) were given the role of servers. In the middle of each table was a metal jug of water and 8 Duralex brand glasses. These had a line etched into them about 2/3 of the way up and YOU DID NOT FILL IT WITH WATER HIGHER THAN THE LINE. I'm not sure what the punishment was if you did, as the two occasions I saw a new pupil do it, they were met with horrified stares of their tablemates and they sipped it down to the line before any of the dinner ladies noticed.
We also had salt and pepper pots went I first started. The pepper was taken away probably less than two years later (because we used to snort it to make ourselves sneeze, obviously), and I think the salt was eventually taken away too to stop kids piling so much on their food that it formed a crust or pouring it in someone else's water.

Food was good traditional English food that had been served in schools since rationing ended. Meat pie and mash, sausages and sauté potatoes (chips were never served), stew and dumpling (singular). Dessert would be old fashioned standards like rice pudding, semolina and occasionally tapioca. These would be served with jam, of which a blob would be put in middle. Some ruffians would stir the jam in, turning the whole thing pink (oh, the horror).

Our custard came in two varieties. Yellow, and pale yellow. Neither were particularly nice.

I have no memory of chocolate concrete ever being served, but we did on occasions have a pudding so wonderful that it made those 5 years worthwhile. Butterscotch tart. The sublime simplicity of pastry, with a sweet - oh, so sweet - sticky goo on top, the colour of antique gold. At that age none of us really knew what butterscotch was. It wasn't toffee, it wasn't caramel, and it didn't seem to exist anywhere else in the outside world. I asked my Mum if she could make it, and she told me it required a special kind of milk. Nowadays you can get it in local bakers and mini-markets, but back then it was unique to school lunch times.
Years later when my Mum was a teacher, my Dad did some minor plumbing work for her school. As part of his payment, he asked that the dinner ladies save him some butterscotch tart. They only went and did a whole extra industrial sized one, meant to feed 12 kids, didn't they?

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