A Day In My Life

Dear Pen Pal,

My English teacher’s making us write letters to you guys. She seems to think it’s an amazing break through in intellect or something. I think its lame, but I’ll humour her, and you, whoever you are. I have no idea what to write. My teacher said to start with writing about my typical day…

Well you probably already know that I’m at Michaelhouse Boys, basically hell on earth, excuse the cliché.

I wonder what would happen if I just hopped the fence. I’m sure it’d take them a while to catch up with me. I could probably even get all the way home. I’ve heard of people, older people of course, hopping the fence and going home… Sure, they always get brought back… and lashed six.

Have you ever been lashed? You have to line up with all the others, who have broken the rules, (things like not wearing your hat outside or talking in a lesson)… outside Mr.Pedrick’s office. He’s the deputy headmaster, notorious for his endorsement of corporal punishment. Mr.Durrant, the head, never does them. People say he’s too soft. It’s always Mr.Pedrick. He’s a despicable little creature with flinty, nasty little eyes and a gold tooth which he flashes around when he smiles. No, he doesn’t smile, he smirks. He doesn’t know how to smile. He threw a chalk board duster straight at my head once in a maths lesson. It hit me right between the eyes. I actually saw stars. Stars! You know when you think back on something like that and you wish that you had done something to make it turn out differently. I always do that. Well I wish that I had caught the duster and threw it straight back at him. Straight at his little hooked nose, and broken it! Well anyway, so we’re standing in our line of silence, and he calls you in one by one. It’s best being the first so you get it over and done with. We always fight to be the first. You walk in and he silently points you to the choice of lashing tools. Usually you get a whip, a bat and a belt. If you get the choice of a bat, always grab it. Never, ever go near the whip. Sometimes you get no choice, and then Mr.Pedrick snaps the whip in his hands relishing the sound for the anxiety it causes you. You have to pull down your pants. (They used to do it through your shorts but there was an incident where someone wore seven pairs of underwear to a lashing to cushion the blow. He was caught, of course. What an idiot. Now we all have to pull down our shorts, so it always draws blood.) You bend over, with your head under the desk and close your eyes, and wait. That wait is the most gut wrenching ordeal. Waiting for the sting. After the first swish and snap, your first reaction is to laugh, then run out of there as fast as you can. If you move, though, you get another, so you force every screaming nerve in your body to stay still. Stone still, waiting for the next one. You know, I don’t know what scares me more, the ability to inflict pain, or our ability to endure it. So many people, so so many people in the world, enduring pain, suffering and torture, just because of the cowardice of the people who don’t have the guts to put it right. I’m not talking, really about us anymore. Lashings are… well they’re lashings. I’m talking about all those poor bastards out there… the ones who drew the short end of the straw when they were born. The ones that endure a beating so severe that it flays their skin with cuts, with the laughter of the person issuing the blows ringing in their ears. The coward. Cruel laughter is the way cowards cry when they’re not alone, and causing pain is how they grieve.
Well now I’m digressing and going on about world issues… Back to lashings before I bore you to death! So you’re in the room getting lashed. The people standing outside hear the swish and snap and they wince. Then they see you sprint, adrenaline pumped, out the door, clutching your buttocks. Later, we compare the bruises, and take bets on whose will go yellow first.

Lashing is the most ridiculous form of punishment ever invented. It does nothing. I learned this when we went on form two camp. A classmate, Bruce Mac- something or other (we call him Bruiser), was told to boil a pot of water. He squatted over the campfire, holding the black, metal pot, with its metal handle, over the flames, until the water boiled. I stared at him in utter disbelief the whole time. His hands were practically charred, and he just grinned stupidly and handed the pot to the teacher. The thing is, once you’ve been here a while, you learn not to feel pain. It would be much more effective to just ration our food or something, if they wanted to punish us. Of course the mere thought of mentioning that to anyone would probably earn me a black eye.

I’ve been lying here awake for an hour, thinking about hopping the fence, and lashings and Bruce Mac- something or other, and writing it all to you, whoever you are at you’re nice day school. Really, I’ve just been dreading morning bell. It’s about to come. Five minutes I reckon. The only thing good about morning bell is the prospect of food. By the time you wake up your gut is practically eating itself, and you can think of nothing but getting your hands on something, anything, to eat.

Morning bell rings at 5 every morning. Everyone slouches out of bed and to the showers. Have you ever seen a communal shower at a boarding school? It’s like one big, red tiled room, smelling of stale soap and piss, with twenty metal heads sticking out of the walls. Twenty of you go in, stand under the ice spears of water for a few seconds, the bare minimum because it practically stops your heart. (I swear, they lower the temperature of the shower water on purpose!) Then you jump out, and fight for a sink at which to brush your teeth. Of course, being in a lower form, I always have to wait. It’s shit. I was a squack in form One. Who knows why I got made a squack. I suppose I just got lucky. If you’re a squack you hardly ever get bullied. My prefect was a complete asshole, inevitably, but at least I didn’t get bullied that much. Anyway, I was always the last to get a sink because I had to spend ten minutes every morning warming up his toilet seat for him. I got him back though… the other squacks and I used to have competitions to see who could work up the phlegmyest, most disgusting spit for our prefects’ coffee in the mornings. I always won.

If misery was put into material form, it would be our breakfast. Grey, lumpy porridge that you wolf in a second, partly because you’re so hungry, partly because it tastes so vile, and partly because if you don’t whip it into your mouth before anyone catches sight of it, then you wont get any at all. It always leaves you feeling hungrier than when you started. Eating breakfast is futile, you might as well skip it, except that you would never do that. Turn down a morsel of food? Never! No matter how pathetic it is, I have yet to miss a breakfast. But tea, ohhhhh glorious tea. As much bread as you want, and on Sundays you get jam. I live for tea. During the morning lessons, I dream of tea. Then after tea, I dream of tomorrow’s tea. They only give it to us so that we don’t collapse in the afternoon. Everyone plays sport here. I play hockey, though I’m not really into it. Most people are all serious about their sport. They’re all tonsils, the lot of them. I have yet to meet someone here who isn’t a tonsil. In fact, I have yet to meet someone who isn’t a tonsil. My parents are the ultimate pair of tonsils for sending me here. Those two? Couple of twits if you ask me. I hate them.

So tell me, pen pal whatever your name is, are you also a tonsil? Well I hope not, ’cause if you are then I’m wasting my time aren’t I? Anyway I’ll assume that you aren’t and that you’re the redeemer who pulls me out of this tonsil pit of hell…I must say this letter is making me feel rather optimistic. Well anyway I’m assuming this and will continue to write. By the way, you don’t have to carry on reading if you don’t want to. You can stop now if you want, if you haven’t already… but I’m rather enjoying this now. I’m kind of getting into it.

After sport you have to get into that incinerating shower again. It’s a bit better in the afternoon, because you’re all hot and sweaty, but not much. Then you have prep. All you can think about during prep is your empty stomach and dodging spit paper balls that people relentlessly shoot, every single night! You’d think they’d get sick of it. Never. Someone put a stink bomb in here once. The place stunk like rotting sewage for weeks. Luckily for him, no one found out who it was.

Dinner is as bad as breakfast. We usually get grey beans. Grey crap if you ask me.

But the day is a picnic. The day is glorious, wonderful compared to the night.

What do you think happens when someone shouts “Lights out!” across a dormitory and flicks the switch, sinking everyone into blackness? Probably you’d think everyone yields to the darkness and goes to bed. Ha, you are very mistaken. At lights out, the wars start. Black versus white. Always. Racial violence at its peak. Nobody escapes it. As soon as darkness strikes the room, hatred is ignited. Foul words are flung into the air like feathers. It’s like a pillow fight of loathing, which turns into an angry brawl of punches. We hate each other with a venom which would have you prim and proper, white shirted, pulled up socks snobs, gasping in shock and disbelief. Ever see what happens after lights out? It’s a snake pit. No one escapes. Everyone lets out their anger, their hunger, their boredom, their pain, after lights out. It comes in streams of turbulent blows aimed at the opposite colour. You’re probably asking yourself: Why choose skin colour to be our source of conflict? Well, I’ll tell you… There is nothing else… we’re all the same. All in the same boat. The only difference is the colour of our skin. It means nothing. It’s just an excuse. And it only happens at night. During the day, we don’t talk to each other at all. We’re invisible to each other. On that note, the weirdest thing happened yesterday. I was sitting, eating my wonderful bread in a very secluded corner so I wouldn’t have to talk to any phoney moronic dickheads, and this small black guy came and sat next to me. He didn’t say anything. He just sat there, chewing his bread and watching me. I looked straight back at him, of course. There was no way I was backing down. But he wasn’t trying to cause trouble or steal my spot or anything. He was kind of peaceful looking, like he’d only just arrived at the school and still had that happy spark of an outsider… Only, I knew he hadn’t just arrived because he was in my English class. The teacher always picks on him’s why I remembered him. Anyway , he just sat there chewing away, and when he was finished, he kind of bared his skew, white teeth in a sort of grin, got up and sauntered off as if he hadn’t a care in the world. What a weird guy, but it was kind of nice sitting there, eating in the presence of someone without worrying about them stealing your food or whatever. I wonder if he’ll come and sit, chewing his bread and watching me, again today?

Anyway, back to my story about the night time. Where was I?... Ah, the fighting. Well it doesn’t go on all night, thankfully. We become human when the prefects arrive. No matter how loud the brawl, you hear them. Like your ears are tuned particularly to their steady footsteps up the gravel path. You dive into the silence of your pitiful blanket. If you’re caught out of bed by the time they’ve opened the door, trouble. Big trouble. They stalk in and through and to their rooms, and you’re left shivering, trying you’re best to be the first to fall asleep, so that you don’t spend the whole night with eyes wide open, unable to block out the snoring and farting and nightmarish sleep talking of everyone else in the dorm.

Yup, that’s about it. A day in the life of me. I’m bored of writing now, and I expect you stopped reading this shit a while ago…
Well anyway… write back if you want.

Chris.