Boarding School Pranks – Three of the Best I Got Up To

I was inspired by a story from Paul Stewart last month:

Paul relays a story about when he was at school and had to face the head teacher. It was about something he had done but could not own up to, so he lied.

For the record, I hated every minute of boarding school. It was a persecution for six years of my life. I didn't realize until I had been there for three and a half years that good guys come last. At least, that is how it was in the pecking order.

If you played the game, put your head down and bum up, you were a hit with the teachers but not so much with the other kids. That was not a good place to be in.

Boarding school boys, full of testosterone, can find clever ways to make you suffer.

I had to find a better balance.

I did. I managed to befriend three of the 'gang, cult, or group leaders,' whatever you want to call them. I remember three pranks that I got up to, one with each.

The Son of a Preacher Man.

One of the friends that I made was Phillip. He was a particularly bright guy and one of the best football players at the school. Those two criteria made him very likable to other boys.

His father was a priest, so he got the nickname Father (surprising how inventive we are, isn't it!).

Every term, we had a social dance with our sister school. The school went coed in the last two years I attended, but the girl boarders were at a different site.

It was an adolescent love fest. The dancing aspect was only to impress the right partner. We were like a bunch of peacocks strutting our stuff. Each person sought a partner to escape the hall. They wanted to sneak into the night for some one-on-one necking.

Real estate became a valuable commodity. Important areas around the school were reserved based on the established hierarchy. Teachers often patrolled the area. They secretly wished to be real-life security bouncers. They paraded around with their torches.

Phillip ("The father") secured the choir room at the back of the chapel. We chose to work as a two-man team. After all, two sets of ears and eyes are better than one."

Taking our willing partners into the choir room. Just as we began to get down to business, the school chaplain barged in, clearly wanting to guard his space.

"What are you up to? " was his question, which seemed pretty obvious, I would have thought.

Phillip, a quick thinker, replied,

"Just showing these ladies the organ!"

His reply was, "In the dark?" 

Good point!

We didn't fare well out of that little encounter.

Where have you been?

The second guy I befriended was Frank. He was a tall, lanky, thrill-seeking, original bad boy with eyes like Marty Feldman. All the teachers knew Frank for all the wrong reasons.

He came from a wheat farm, had no interest in private school, and loved smoking. They had already punished and suspended him several times for smoking.

On Saturday nights, the girl boarders would come around to watch a movie. Frank's girlfriend was best friends with my girlfriend, so the four of us did a few things together when we could.

Frank felt trapped one Saturday night. He suggested we skip the movie. Instead, we could grab a drink with our partners at the state school next door.

Frank looked old enough to buy beer legally, so he made the purchase, and off we went.

We wouldn't have been good spies. We didn't even see the housemaster follow us out of the dining room, where the movie was about to start. He had quickly put two and two together and realized that not all was well in Denmark when we left.

We left for about an hour. Not wanting to draw attention and planned to return to the dining room before the movie ended.

We didn't know that on this night, the powers that be chose to take roll call during the interval. So, guess who wasn't present?

You have to admire the housemaster's dedication. He waited at the school border until we got back. We got caught red-handed. To make it worse, we swore we had seen most of the movie, not realizing there was a roll call.

After a long, agonizing week of deliberation, he determined our punishment. The school suspended Frank for a week because of his serial offenses.

My punishment was to tell my parents what I had done. I can still hear the disappointment in my father's voice. The girls were let off free because they had been misled!

No time for physics - burn the lab down!

My third scenario involved a guy named Geoff. Geoff struggled with school, and we both struggled with physics in our final year. I hated it, as did Geoff.

We saw no reason to calculate how fast a boy rode his bike uphill when facing a 30 mph headwind on a 30-degree slope. Who cares!

We realized there was no hope for us. Our physics teacher, who was from Czechoslovakia and had a strong accent, was so easy to make fun of. So, we treated physics like playtime.

We both sat in the front row and repeatedly heckled the teacher, who took it all in stride. He would just shake his head in disbelief at our absolutely ridiculous answers. No matter how often he detained us for extra lessons, it just didn't sink in.

Our antics all came to a head one class when we were doing experiments. The teacher had gone out, as he often did, for five or ten minutes.

We couldn't get enough amps into our machine. It was measuring current resistance or something. Geoff decided to play with the fuse box to see what he could do to increase the power supply to our bench.

You probably guessed what happened. We short-circuited the apparatus which went up in a puff of smoke. We denied any wrongdoing when he returned and blamed it on faulty equipment.

We both paid the price in the long run and, not surprisingly, got an "F" for physics in the final exams.

I damaged my good record at boarding school to protect myself from bullying. I formed relationships with those guys for self-preservation.

I look back on these and wonder, "Would I do it differently?"

Probably not; it was all I could do to survive those years. I ended up O.K.

I still don't care about the boy on the bike. 

If it's too hard to pedal, get off and walk!

Till next time,

Calvin