Canteen

"Stand still!" Boy, these lads were full of energy. They'd just had "canteen". Canteen was a big deal. The girls from the camp down the road had come up to the boys camp, and filed through a cordoned off area of the main hall. Why did the girls get to go first? The boys had sat at the trestle tables eating their lunch, a bizzare collection of 80's dinner plates piled high with macaroni cheese. If the cutlery had been a few years older, it would have been melted down and made into aircraft engines for the war effort back in the early 1940s.

The meal was washed down with good Southland well water, drunk from brown glass mugs. The boys were jumpy, they ate the food but didn't taste it. Their eyes were fixed on the cracks in the make-shift wall that divided the room. Dividers, the same kind of thing that you see in the floor to ceiling windows of real-estate offices were lined up, closing off the entrance to the carpeted area of the hall. A round table, almost as high as you are when you stand up was leant against the last divider and the wall of the hall. With one of it's three sets of legs folded down, it formed the door into this mysterious room to which so much attention was directed.

Five tables seated about thirty boys and eight or nine leaders. It was all the leaders could do to keep the boys under control. Occasionally a straggler would get up from his table, "I'm going to get a cup of water", and then make a desperate rush for "the wall". One of the leaders at the escapee's table would give the short sharp, and respected command "Oi!". The boy would retrace his steps back to the table, as would the other two or three lads who had opted to join in his ruthless exercise in espionage.

"Hey... that boy keeps flicking cheese at me." I look over at the table where the offender is seated. He acts as if he doesn't know I'm looking at him. He glances towards the wall, over towards the kitchen, and then makes eye contact with me. Oh, you're looking at me - I didn't realise. His face reveals what he is thinking and I congratulate myself on my steady resolve. I mouth the word don't and he looks at me wonderingly. A cold glance and a knowing look soon ensure that the boy knows what the deal is. He shrugs his shoulders helplessly. I can't help it. Heheh, boys. I was one once.

I breathe out heavily, a thoughtful sigh. My knees are stiff from keeping up with the lads in the games. And my back and shoulders, surely I'm too young to feel so old. Heck, when I was a wee lad, they hadn't pulled the Berlin wall down yet. I knock back the last few drips in the bottom of my cup. I'll fill 'er up in the kitchen, a break from the noise for a moment. Nine year old Cody from Mark's table followed me into the dish-washing room. "You want some water too?" I fill Cody's glass from the shower-head like commercial tap. Cody pours the water down his throat, three gulps and the glass is empty. Why don't they make bigger ones? He holds the glass toward me and I fill it again. He catches his breath after his exertions and an with an earnest face informs me that he holds the record for sculling water at his school. He turns, walks through the sliding door and into the fray, leaving the solace of the kitchen behind. After emptying two cups of the good liquid, I filled up again and followed Cody into the hall. Nothing could have prepared me for the disorder and carnage that confronted me.

Half of the boys were up from their seats, rampaging at the foot of "the wall". It was a messy, out of control scrum. Boys were lying down, peering through the gap at the bottom of the dividers. At the west end of the wall, two boys made a stirrup from their hands while another lad attempted to scale the sheer face. Several of the boys had taken it upon themselves to restore order to the situation. Someone had spilled their cup of water; grated cheese flew through the air, temporarily blocking out the light, causing the boys to fight in the shade. Uncle Jake and Uncle Tim were sitting back to back on one of the chairs, with a boy between them. They were squeezing the life out of the poor wee blighter, looking around nonchalantly, acting as if they didn't know he was there.

In his right arm, Uncle Jake held another lad around the neck, "pretend-strangling" him in a loose hold. My mind went into slow motion for half a second and I reflected on the good-natured violent fun that these Southern guys have. None of this mollycoddling "lets go bowling" or "paintball is so exhilarating". On one or two occasions, a boy had asked me if the next game we were going to play would be a violent game. In the first hour that I had been at the camp, the boys had been playing a game similar to hockey. Using tightly rolled newspaper batons, as thick as your wrist and as long as your arm, the boys defended their team's goal and tried to get the plastic disc into the other team's goal. To say that there were no rules would be an extreme understatement. "Hit them while they're down" seemed to be the name of the game. Horrific flashbacks to the time that I played the Mesoamerican ballgame filled my head, causing me to involuntarily shudder.

Two boys pulled at the circle table, trying to roll it away. It teetered dangerously, threatening to crush them and they stepped back to re-evaluate the situation. I slipped quietly back into the dish-washing room and walked hurriedly into the kitchen. The cooks bless 'em, and two or three leaders were seated at the big table in the middle of the commercial-scale camp kitchen. The boys are going crazy. Uncle Hamish, camp director wearily rose to his feet, gave me a sad, knowing smile and then led the way back out through the dish-washing room into the hall. The piercing shrill of the whistle that hung around his neck would not be sufficient. QUIET! Silence hit the room like a baseball catching you in the stomach when you are daydreaming in the middle of a game. Uncle Jake and Uncle Tim released their victims, several other leaders looked sheepishly at Uncle Hamish, avoiding eye-contact. The boys returned to their seats.

Forty minutes later, I crawled out of my sleeping bag. A siesta is surely one of the best things that can ever happen to a guy. That warm, sweaty sleeping bag, maybe the added boon of the incomprable warmth of the sun, just a hint of a breeze coming through the crack between the door and the concrete floor of the bunk room. Blurry eyed and feeling like a nice hot cup of tea and a biscuit, I walked up the path, up the steps, into the hall. The last few boys were getting their "canteen". There was several kilos of spearmint leaves left, and some other bags of nameless poor-quality sugar-based gut-rot. Most of the stuff's made in flippin Iraq! Who knows what they put in the blimmin stuff... Cola-pop, hah, great, that fake, Coca Cola flavour rip-off that leaves a dodgy after-taste. There were a few small moro bars left in a bag which had been hurriedly torn apart. The "toffees" wrapped in silvery plastic. The wrappers on these wee beauties don't come off properly, they always leave shards of silvery plastic embedded in the surface of the sweet. It's a concern.

Uncle John and Uncle Tim had picked up the accountant's pen and performed the task before them with admirable capability. Each of the boys had been given a "bank account" when he had arrived at camp. Any expenses he wished to make during this week away from his family were to be made from this bank account. To further complicate the matter, there was a limit of how much each boy could spend on canteen each day. I resisted the urge to part with some small change, trusting to the generosity of the lads to get a handful of lollies. On the drive down to Dunedin, we had stopped off at Omaru, and here I had bought three 500g packs of "seconds" chocolate coated marshmallow easter eggs for the very reasonable price of $5. Having given one of the bags to my sister Lydia, with no hope of repayment, I had shared out the other two bags with the boys in my cabin, and as such, they were quite possibly, I surmised, in a generous mood.

Sure enough, as I stood at the back of the lined up green team, Aiden turned around and offered me a grimy pink eskimo man. I gladly accepted, however through use of crude sign language and a hoarse, seemingly meaningless whisper, encouraged him to turn round and stand up straight. The best behaved team got to go to do their activity first. Come on green team! Each cabin had a colour, four cabins, four colours, red, blue, orange and us, the green team. The blue team was notorious for ridiculously impecable behaviour at appel. The Orange team was so far behind that it just wasn't funny any more. The reds were our closest threat, as we vied for the inevitable second place that we both hoped for come end of camp.

Ok, quiet please. Uncle Hamish took control of the situation. The quietest team will go first. The boys calmed down, and I knelt down to tie my muddy shoe-laces. Four different activities; target practice with bows and arrows, or air rifles, go-carts or kayaking. Hands up who wants to go kayaking. The majority of the would-be kayakers were members of the green team, and so it was to be Uncle Jake, Uncle John and myself heading off down to the lake to take the boys kayaking.

to be continued...