Thro' The Wall

I spent four out of my five years at Boston Grammar School with the same formroom; a "mobile" classroom (or "Portakabin") dubbed "Room V" (that's V as in "Vee", a letter). Room V was a truly mobile classroom as it was physically moved from one side of the school to the other at the end of my first year. I had entered the school as an 11 year old in September 1982, part of class 1G with Patrick (Melvin) Huston as form master (and Simon Meeds as prefect for part of that time!). Room V at that time was one of three "mobiles" located where the dining hall now stands. All three were first year form rooms; other mobiles in the area included the Latin and Classics mobile, generally the domain of Ron (Frankie) Abbott and complete with Motorhead posters, and the History and Economics double mobile that looked out across the playing fields.

At the end of the first year the mobiles were moved to make way for the building of the dining hall, and I vividly remember arriving at school for the first day of my second year and finding nothing on the original site of Room V but an old 1976 school diary! As it was it had been moved into the main yard where it would remain as my formroom for the next three years. I was lucky to have been placed with the majority of my friends in class 2F under the watchful eye of the legendary Richard Anderson for the next four years, who allowed us to stamp our personalities on the room in the form of numerous pictures of bands, which made an interesting compliment to his own collection of European language based posters (Cheeses of France with a picture of Echo and the Bunnymen nearby was the kind of thing we excelled at). Our form room now nestled near to an archway which led from the science area to the yard and was placed about five feet from the Greyfriars wall, which ran parallel the mobile and led right up to the main gates. The wall had been part of the original greyfriars monastery and was very very old.

The main door to our room faced the wall and the only fixed part of the whole affair, some paving slabs bedded on brick, led you up and then in. For reasons best known to my mother, my brother and I were always driven to school very early, so that I used to end up at the door of Room V at about eight o'clock every morning. Very often the door was locked, but it was usually only a few minutes wait until the caretaker arrived and let me and the other few early arrivals in (whereupon we immediately sparked up the lethal gas fire as most mobiles were freezing first thing in the morning). And thus the day began.

Some time during the winter of my third year at school a caretaker crisis erupted; we very often weren't let into our classroom until nearly 9 o'clock, because there was no one to open up (there were several instances of the entire class being late for assembly!). It was one particularly cold morning that something very silly happened which had far reaching consequences.

I had arrived at school and was waiting outside my form room, freezing, when a good friend, who also usually arrived early, turned up (he shall remain nameless for slightly religious reasons). In our frustration at not being allowed into our lovely, not-at-all-smelly-or-cold form room we hatched on a plan to alleviate the boredom.

We would tunnel through the wall.

Looking back on the idea it wasn't really going to get us into the room any faster, so I suppose it must just have been a way of passing the time. What I do realise now is that if you ever start something, such as tunnelling through a mediaeval wall, with a vague intention to get to the other side, but only about fifteen minutes and an old compass with which to accomplish it, don't ever think, as I did, that you'd "just have a go and see what happens".

Because this is the kind of thing that happens.

My friend and I got out our compasses and began hacking away at the mortar which, being very old, was nice and crumbly. We probably got about an inch and a half out of one of the vertical spaces before we got let in, but by that time a small crowd had gathered and various reinforcements had been drafted in. As far as my pal and I were concerned we'd been let in and had a fun time waiting and that was about that. The thing was that the others that had gathered were taking this whole thing much more seriously. I noticed that digging had continued by first break and by the end of the week everybody seemed to have had a go and things were looking fairly impressive.

Over the next few weeks the digging team seemed to be reduced to a hard-core of three people (none of whom were there at the start) armed now with metal rulers, coins and other things schoolboys keep in their pockets, plus various other minor diggers and whoever felt like having a go, which included most of the school's French and German pupils who were taught in our form room. Digging fever had gripped the school, and no one really seemed to know why; maybe it was some kind of metaphor for squeezing spots or something; you know, you shouldn't do it but you do even though it's bad and serves no real purpose.

Sometime shortly after that we got the first brick out.

It lay at the foot of the wall amongst all the sandy debris and instead of horrifying anyone it only seemed to deepen the fervour for destroying the wall. Amazingly no staff members seemed to care very much at that stage, so we carried on. Every time you went into the classroom another bit was missing, and some people took it very seriously and it ended up getting completely out of hand. Before long you could get a protractor into the hole and indeed protractors were very good for general scraping duties. The best thing I ever saw though was a fellow pupil staring intently at the hole and methodically removing huge amounts of sand with his school diary. It was pretty crazy and the pile of bricks and old mortar got bigger and bigger.

I completely lost interest in the enterprise, and therefore can't remember that much about the progress of the hole until the end, when it was about one foot high and several bricks deep. I recall a member of staff mentioning the architectural significance of the wall and how it wasn't a good thing what we were doing, and then I just remember it getting fixed !

What I don't remember is anyone really getting punished for it, which is lucky for me really as I surely should have got a right leathering along with my friend for starting the whole thing off. But that's it! In retrospect and with the wisdom of age it's probably one of the most reckless and pointless and, strangely, most accomplished acts of schoolboy vandalism the school has ever seen.