Primary School Lunchtime

The room is completely square, painted an uninspiring beige and gargantuan from my seven-year-old perspective on the world. I enter through the swing doors, the glass panes encasing netted wire akin to the cages at the zoo, and the heat plasters a moist film across my face. My neon-coloured backpack is considered cool in my year, predating the denim drawstring bags which were the compulsory statement of year six girls. The room is split, the pupils segregated by their dietary preferences. I weave through the Formica tables, squeaking in my patent leather shoes, and find my place in the section for those bringing packed lunches. The artificial light is so intense that it burns onto our young eyes, forcing everybody to bow their heads to the table. Pupils are arranged shoulder to shoulder, like army ranks. The scratchy plastic chair curves under the heat, the sides catching the threads on my pinafore hem. The queue for the serving-area snakes its way down one wall of the room, surging and pulsing with the bustle of pupils hungry for their lunch. The girls giggle and plait their hair, watching the boys playfully shoving each other or scuffing their chunky loafers on the linoleum.
The noise climbs, a constant competition and battle to be heard. The clatter of the metal serving utensils, the crinkle of crisp-packets, and the instruction of the supervisors versus the comical banter of the pupils liberated from their classrooms. We are all humbled by the dominating vision that is Mrs Acaster in her electric blue overalls, superior to the standard pale yellow. Her voice, a dangerous shriek, reaches the far shadowy corners of the ceiling, and her hair shines scarlet under the strip-lights. I spend most of my time studying my lunch, usually a tuna and pickle sandwich on coarse brown bread, the dry chewy crusts cementing themselves to my teeth. The sandwich is slightly soggy from its morning period resting on my coat-hook in the cloakroom. The kitchen roll it is folded into is invariably speckled with tuna flakes and butter-grease. Wedged beside the smooth plastic box is my water bottle containing the weak lemon squash, usually leaking from the container and forming oily swirls of liquid on the polished table-top. An apple, bruised from the jostling as I run into school, is second-best to the chocolate biscuit. Slightly melting from the humidity, it is crammed into my mouth in three bites, or traded between my classmates for a superior equivalent.
We all proffer our wares; nothing too inspiring, as we all live in the constant fear of the daily inspection by Mrs Acaster. Her list of prohibited items is added to on a regular basis, usually coinciding with her mood, the pupil who has brought the offending object, and the effect the weather has played on her hair. Sweets, fizzy drinks, chewing gum, any exciting chocolate bar...all were condemned to the list. This sits awkwardly beside her ‘rules of conduct’ which she would recite to any person at any given time. Not eating everything was the big no-no, as was finishing somebody else’s food to prevent them being screamed at, getting up without asking, not getting up when told to, eating too quickly or too slowly...the system was structured so that our young minds, contaminated by television and comic books, would be unable to remember everything and therefore render ourselves vulnerable to Mrs Acaster.
One year, on my birthday, my mum hid a tube of smarties in my lunchbox and such was my fear of ‘the rules’ that I begged her to take them out. A grown-up could not understand the code of conduct in place in that room, for it was her domain, and within the scent of pickled onion crisps and lamb chops, there was the discernible tang of fear.