Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

After a few classes in the morning, the teacher often reads stories to us or plays nursery rhymes. Later, we’ll have our break time and then we can play in the playground. This was my life as a five-year-old in an English public school.

We are now sitting in a semi-circle on the floor in the classroom with our teacher, Miss Honey, sitting in front of us. She reads us the nursery rhymes for today. First was “Georgie Porgie,” and the next was “What are little boys made of?”.

What are little boys made of?
Snips, snails
And puppy-dogs’ tails
That’s what little boys are made of.

What are little girls made of?¹⁰⁶
Sugar and spice
And everything nice
That’s what little girls are made of.

What are little boys made of? If I were the one to decide, little boys are made of gravel, cinders, treasures, and adventures. As if on cue, the bell rang and it was time for the break. My ‘army’ of boys are now about to show just how much of that was true. 

Navy blue gym knickers hanging high up out of reach

We immediately scampered out into the school playground. Peter stayed behind in our classroom to continue quietly reading his ABC book. Other days, he stayed to practice copying sentences. My classmates and I, on the other hand, ran around shouting silly things and giving each other dares. In other words, we often made quite a monkey racket after being caged in more or less silence in the classroom for too long.

The playground is the place we love the most. The ash-like gravel that covered the ground was not cinders to us – but a treasure trove of collectable items and ‘weapons’. With our bare hands, we would scoop up the gravel and filter out these small, black, shiny balls (which in hindsight must have been buckshot). We didn’t know what they were, but they turned our simple day into a fun adventure every time, collecting the small treasures became a game. 

The girls from our class, on the other hand, typically run straight to the roofless outdoor toilets which were in the playground.  They rarely came to play with us and join in our adventures, but they would sometimes watch, and talk among themselves. They were like another ‘army’, but without our fun adventures.

I didn’t know much about girls, but I knew enough that they wore navy blue gym knickers, which they had to pull down and sit down when they were peeing. I didn’t know this because I had been in their toilets, no! Our teachers just taught us that we had separate toilets, because boys pee standing up, and girls pee sitting down; yet we never really knew how they did it.

But those navy blue knickers– those were something else! I always passed by them hanging high up on the school’s clothes-line, seemingly like flags waving at me, taunting me to make them part of our adventure. 

“You can never take us,” I imagined them whispering. At five years old, these thoughts lingered in my head. What are little girls made of?

As I watched the army of girls disappear into their toilets, I started feeling more adventurous. I assembled my ‘army’ and we gathered our weapons of buckshot-laden cinders. Drunk with curiosity and the idea of bringing adventure to this boring army, I commanded, “It’s us against the girls! On a count of three, throw the cinders over the wall!” 

I initiated the first attack, scooping cinders and throwing them over the wall on to the heads of the girls who I knew were sitting down peeing. The other boys followed suit, with my friend Tom Cockfoster taking over to give further orders. The cinders showered nicely on each of the girls’ heads. We didn’t see it, but we knew for sure from the shrieks that came from the roofless cubicles. We laughed our hearts out, clutching our stomachs.

Soon enough, a few girls ran outside, with their wet blue knickers around their knees, just like I had imagined. We had stormed the citadel of the girls’ toilets, and brought down the army’s flag! Some girls were still in the cubicles, and the one-sided battle continued. 

I had lost interest once I felt the storming had been victorious. So I watched it unfold from the side-lines. I was surprised to see Alice Lahtiff among the last of the girls who left the cubicles. She seemed to have stayed inside as long as possible to fix her dress, so she could emerge from the girls’ toilets in dignified fashion. Sadly, I couldn’t say the same for her girlfriends who had bared all.

I didn’t expect any less because I always thought that she was smart and very, very pretty. She immediately went up to the grinning group of boys left standing around, and shouted, “You are all going to pay for this!” Her face was flushed with anger. 

Miss Whackalot

The next morning, we had an assembly, as we usually do. All the pupils were gathered in the assembly room. It was just big enough to fit around fifty children, teachers, and the headmistress combined, yet also small enough to see everyone up close. But like no other assemblies, this was about the ‘crime’ we had committed the day before.  

Our headmistress, Miss Whackalot (Miss Trunchbull), was sitting on the raised platform, her ruddy face glowering. We were going to be punished, she said. But I didn’t know what it meant because I’d never been ‘punished’ before. She first recounted the events in the playground and then read out the names of the perpetrators one-by-one. Tom Cockfoster was the first to be called out. 

“Come here my boy. Do you realise you have to be punished if you do something wrong?  This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you! But you have to learn what is right and wrong! Do you understand?” 

Tom looked down at the floor, subdued, and answered quietly, “Yes mam I understand.”

“Then come here and lie across my lap!” the headmistress commanded in a strict voice. Tom, holding back tears, crawled across her skirted lap. The headmistress adjusted his body, so his bottom was raised, so his head and legs were dangling down on either side of her lap. I felt my stomach tighten. She pulled down his short grey trousers revealing his small plump and white buttocks. Right then and there, she smacked his bottom fairly hard until it turned a pink-reddish colour.

Tom started to whimper, and my stomach whimpered with him. When she was done, she hitched his trousers up and told him to go back to his seat, saying, “I hope you have learnt your lesson now!” The rest of the ‘army’ were called and smacked across the angry headmistress’ lap one by one. I felt guilty, and then scared, as I waited for my turn. 

“Surely I will get the strongest whacking for being the leader,” I thought to myself. But my turn never came, for whatever reason it was. Perhaps it was the blue flag’s gift to me.

That day, in my five-year old brain, I learned three important lessons:

“The guilty often go free”

“Punishment is not always fair”

“The gods are not always watching”

I was the guilty one – the instigator of the crime, but Tom Cockfoster, and those who followed, were the ones punished and humiliated. It was I who was the real mastermind behind the storming of the girls’ capitol! 

The Romans had a system of decimation; if their troops had failed to successfully storm an enemy’s capitol, the commander would let the sword fall arbitrarily on the necks of every tenth soldier. I suppose the arbitrary punishment dished out by the headmistress was just a means of pacifying us boys.

Maybe the ‘Gods’ (that is, parents and teachers) are not always watching. Maybe the guilty who are the ringleaders always get off scot-free! Or so I thought. I was no Georgie Porgy – it wasn’t as if I had ‘grabbed’ at them. While thinking back, I remember the rest of the rhyme:

What are little girls made of?
What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice
And everything nice!

¹⁰⁶  Harkness, Ian . (2005). “Mother Goose Songs”. Telemark University College, Norway.