How I finally became a confirmed vegetarian
There were many terrible elements of school life in the 1970s1,2, however, for me, the worst were school dinners. I had decided at quite a young age I didn't like meat. This wasn't, at the time, an ethical decision – though it has grown to become one – rather it was a result of years of 1970s cookery, which largely centred on gristle, membranes, and the thick tubes in liver. If it could make you gag, it could just as easily stick in the youthful gaps between your teeth and make you gag twice; indeed, 1970s British cooking seemed hell-bent on ensuring it.
By the time I was six, I was slowly finding more and more meat revolting, and doing my best to avoid it. For an era that saw a revival of anarchistic agrarianism and the tail end of the hippy movement, schools were surprisingly unprepared for vegetarians, but what they were prepared for was children who didn't eat their dinners3. These were clearly the naughtiest of children, and didn't deserve the joy of learning. Which brings us to The Pork Chowder.
One especially awful dinnertime, we were served, as our main delight, with bowls of thin pinkish-brown semi-translucent liquid in which floated greasy chunks of pork gristle, like grim fatbergs in a sea of bloodied anal fluid, the like of which only appears at the end of an especially violent bout of diarrhoea when, emptied of anything approaching food, the body is only capable of producing a thin but urgent fountain of weakly gelatinous rectal lubricant. The buoyant masses were almost too large for our small mouths, and were clearly going to require a good deal of cheek-bulging chew to get them anywhere near edible; the fluid itself smelt like unholy terror. This was certainly a step beyond the usual offal transmogrified, if you'll forgive, into dry "catburgers", and a step way too far for me.
I sat through the main course without even attempting to eat it; sat, with some relief, through 'pudding' – which was that day a rare treat "for the good children who've eaten up" – a universally detested mix of tangerines, cornflakes, and cheap whipped cream which always settled evilly on the stomach; and I sat as slowly all the other children disappeared to play and I was left to the machinations of the kitchen staff, who had carte blanch to keep me prisoner until I broke. Every five minutes one of the group of specially assigned martinets would come out and gently but with a hint of anger tell me in no uncertain terms I wasn't moving until I ate up. And so I stayed. I stayed while they cleared the other tables away, and the hall was transformed, me and my table in the centre for all to see; stayed while I missed the first postprandial lesson; and stayed well into the second, until their refusal to let me go to the loo finally made me break. Unobserved and desperate, I hooked out one piece of gristle on my fork, examined the grim grey string of meat hanging on one side of the car-crash lump, which itself somehow appeared simultaneously gelatinous and as solid as a knucklebone, and stuffed the lot through my tightly resisting jaws.
I took one gigantic chew, and vomited violently straight into the bowl infront of me. Naturally, despite looking now exactly like vomit, it had changed not an iota.
Imagine, therefore, my predicament when the dinner lady came back, with her threats, only for me to tell her that what I had infront of me was not, as she felt, a cheap but nutritious soup, but instead, freshly delivered child sick. My protestations went down, well, like being told the truth that your food is indistinguishable from vomit. I was informed, in no uncertain terms, that I was going to eat it, or wet myself. And so, eat it I did; weeping with tears of six-year-old anger the whole way through, and if there is any justice at all in this world there is a circle in hell entirely filled with a river of this vile meld of chunder and chowder, in which float the upended gristly arses of those 1970s dinner-ladies as they bob, heads submerged, until they've drunk the infinite stream of their soup, sick, and sobs dry.
11 June 1977 / 11 June 1978
Notes:
1 Mention school medicals, for example, to anyone who lived through them, and watch them trying to work out if they were a class action waiting to happen, or a lone individual criminal suit – and, indeed, if anyone would be alive to prosecute.
2 It should be noted that I was taught that the past tense of "show" was "shew", which only goes to prove how much inertia there was in the British school system. Corporal punishment was still common, but for me "shew", more than anything, indicates how few generations of progressive teacher trainers there actually were between myself and the 1800s.
3 As lunch was then called. They're still dinner-ladies; don't at me.