I pretty much lived on school food between the age of 6 and 18, and even after I had left school , I would still eat school food whenever I was home, as Mum was able to bring home a meal from the staff canteen. It is perhaps my guilty pleasure that I love school food. I have always had a massive appetite, and quantity was always more important to me than taste or sophistication. Which is probably a good thing, as some of the food was pretty basic. Even as an eight year old, I realised that some of this food we were offered wasn’t to everyone’s taste.  Some of the ‘day bugs’ couldn’t stomach the food at all, so would barely touch anything at lunchtime, knowing they would get fed properly by mother later that day. The boarders were more phlegmatic, and generally had to eat anything that was thrown at them.

 I had lived through a bad case of tape worm during our year in Saudi Arabia, and for our first year back in England, had to regularly swallow a foul medicine. This was some  ‘strawberry’ flavoured stuff that I found very hard to swallow. The sessions when we had to take this medicine seemed interminable to me. I just couldn’t swallow the stuff without vomiting it back. My parents were very patient as it must have been hard for them to make us take this stuff. I remember my father swallowing a dose of the medicine as if it were Mansfield Bitter,  coming up smiling and showing me that this stuff wasn’t so bad at all. I knew that he had done this for me; how this episode ended I do not know; presumably at some point I must have accepted the medicine. 

All of which is somewhat irrelevant, but I often wonder whether my often insatiable appetite for food is down to this episode of the worms ; it certainly seemed do no harm in my ability to consume vast quantities of school food. Whilst in the junior school , choice was limited ; in fact, I wonder whether there was any.

There was a difference in the lunchtime menu and the evening. For lunch,  there were all the day pupils to cater for on top of the boarders; there tended to be a choice then. In the junior school , we all queued up in classes and then sat down wherever there was a space.

Lunchtime meat was of a thin variety. If white, it was pork, chicken or perhaps, wonder of wonders,  turkey. If brown with a marbled skein of fat, beef. Perhaps we had lamb sometimes. The colour of this would have been somewhat indistinct. Possibly grey. You would know it was lamb as it came with mint sauce.

There were always boiled or roast potatoes, or occasionally, mash. The boiled versions could be grey, and the mash was always lumpy, but the roast potatoes were exquisite, cooked no doubt in the fats of  the indeterminate meats. I have no doubt that the roast potatoes would today have Hugh Fearnley and his ilk salivating in pleasure. 

The one thing I could not eat were the broad beans. These were most certainly coloured an impossible shade of grey and green. Our lunchtimes were patrolled by the dinner police, teachers who would been assigned the job that day of ensuring that the pupils ate their greys. Mr Goodgame, he of Maths and old school football fame, was particularly adept at the gestapo Dinner-man role, and would not allow a plate to go to slops uncleaned. Broad beans would be placed in the corner of mouth, then, when outside the hall, be transferred to pocket of blazer, where they would fester until they could be safely removed, out of sight of the Gestapo.

In 1979 Pink Floyd single ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ was number one in the charts. Everyone loved to sing : “we don’t need no Education”  (with some ambivalence for me: at this time I had grown out of my naïve love of school work that I  felt in then junior school, and was happy to nurture a disdain for work and school, whilst also thinking “well, actually, education might be a good thing”) . In the refrain at the end of the song, a sadistic teacher is heard screaming: “how can you have your pudding, if you won’t eat your greens”; whenever I heard this , I was transported back to the day when I was faced with that plate of grey broad beans.

The puddings were  wonderful . They were like something out of Alice in Wonderland, with clashing psychedelic colours pulsing  from the great vats and trays out of which they were served:   jam roly poly, striped with thick red jam, and topped with yellow custard; a fluorescent pink semolina, uniformly hated except by a few of us die-hards, who could see through the toxic chemical exterior into the inner loveliness of the creamy worm like texture.

The  piece de resistance was  chocolate pudding with a mint custard that was bright enough to light up an airport runway. This was the treat we had every Friday lunchtime. These are the sort of puddings that Heston Blumenthal spends days replicating, and charges the earth for.

In the evenings, whilst in the junior school, the boarders always sat on the same table according to their dorms. We would queue up as per lunchtime, then sit down with our food. Our family sat at our own formica topped table at the bottom of the hall. It felt very odd, to be eating amongst ones own peer group, and yet separate to them. Before meal, grace was spoken.

There was no choice in food for the evening meal. Typically the meal was chips with something, and more often than not, sausages.

I must have eaten hundreds of the sausages, always pink on one side and dark brown or black on the other. They had virtually no flavour and I loved them. They were especially nice eaten between two slices of the Sunblest white bread always served at tea.

In 1976 we started to go to France for family holidays. It was during the second or third of these holidays, so in the second half of the 1970s, that we first bought takeaway chips and sausages from a van on the camp site. You would take a saucepan or other container to the van, and this would be filled with chips and sausages. The sausages were exquisite. They were made from meat mixed with onion and possibly even garlic and herbs. They smelled like something from another planet, and tasted absolutely exquisite. This was my first taste of basic food that was not  white or off-white in colour  and absolutely bland. Visits to these exotic chip vans became highlights of our holidays, and we talked about the flavoured sausages and thin chips for weeks, if not months, afterwards. It would be years before we tasted anything with such flavour at school in England.

Bill Tamblin was the head cook. My mother would constantly grumble about the food; not so much the standard of it, as cooking for 100s cannot have been easy; more, the lack of variety. This was of course the 1970s, and the British were still eating the same things as we had in the 1950s, albeit in great quantities. No one had heard of pasta them let alone pesto ( I did not taste this until I was about 20, in the late 1980s; it was the strangest thing I’d eaten since the mint custard). My mother was possibly a bete noire to Bill;  an interfering woman with these modern ideas. 

Having lived in in Malaysia for many years my parents  had tasted more exotic foods – Nasi Goreng, rice and meatballs etc. Back in England, mum was an early adopter of the more sophisticated foods that it was rumoured were eaten on the continent. Pizza, cucumber, green peppers, green salads, food with flavourings like pepper. So she felt that perhaps the school could dare to try some of these dishes. At home, Birds Angel Delights were still a glorious luxury.

By the 1980s, the food was finally changing. Chips were sometimes ‘fries’, there was sometimes a choice , and I suspect some thought had gone in to promoting a balanced diet.

Thirty year later, and I suspect the cuisine is multinational and better than most of us eat on a daily basis.

In 2007, when Mum was seriously ill in a hospice in Yeovil, and on the way to visit her,  I called on Jeff at All Hallows school , where he was working. All Hallows is a similar sized school to Wells. Jeff and I went to the school canteen for lunch. I was heartened that although the standard of food was much better than when I was a pupil, it was still basically of a meat and two veg variety. I had a white meat. Later that afternoon, talking to Mum at the hospice, we told her  that Jeff and I had had lunch together in his school canteen. I said how much I had enjoyed the pork,  at which point Jeff that informed me that the white meat had in fact been turkey. We laughed, and I was somehow further heartened by the fact that school meat should only ever be classified by colour and never by animal of origin.