The Absence of Carrots

Chicken Supreme. God, you could smell it all the way down the corridor from mid morning onwards; such disgusting slop. How were we supposed to concentrate on our Times Tables or our joined-up writing practice with that stench curling its way around our bodies and down our noses? The very smell of it made me want to chuck up. My only solace was that I was not the only one who felt like that.

School dinners were always a trial for me. I never liked any of them very much. I struggled each and every day to clean my plate quickly enough to keep up with my friends. One of the worst school dinners was liver wrapped up in bacon rashers. I always thought that was a sneaky trick to play on us kids, but at least I could steal that away into my pocket with little fuss or mess.

Vegetables could be troublesome, but mostly I managed to deal with them. Peas were best as I could just swallow them without chewing, sort of pretend they were pills that I washed down with a mouthful of water.

Chicken Supreme, however, was the mother of all school dinners - puke without the carrots, and we all struggled with that one. Try shoving that into your pockets and getting away with it.

I don´t remember what they used to serve with it. It couldn´t have been carrots, surely? If it was then I have blotted that part out of my memory. It really would have looked like sick then, wouldn´t it? Who really cares anyway, it was unlikely that it was redeeming enough to ease the torture of the Chicken Supreme. I know I used to cringe as it was slopped onto my plate, in great proportions by sadistic-looking dinner ladies. Then I would shuffle to a table with my friends and we´d all stare at it, then at each other and then back at our plates again. There was precious little chicken in it too. I could have coped with finding chunks of chicken that I could scrape the sauce off - that wouldn´t have made my leftovers appear so bad.

I would sit and hold my breath so that I didn´t have to smell it. Breathing through my mouth instead of my nose just made it unbearable because the smell took on a physical presence that lined the back of my throat and stuck half way down my insides. My stomach knew it was coming too and must have dreaded it, and there was nowhere to go. Duty teachers paced up and down the lines of tables, taking in with great detail the progress of consumption. I had done time on the slow table before, and I didn’t want to end up doing time there again.

My friends were braver than I. They all eventually sighed and resigned themselves to it. Slowly they would begin to eat, but all I could do was stare at it, sighing also, but with that sigh that comes before vomiting. I´d push it around my plate, watching it congeal as it cooled. It only made it worse.

Throughout dinner, we kept our beady little eyes on the area where our dirty plates had to be stacked when we had finished. There was always a duty teacher standing guard at the entrance. It was their job to check we had cleared our plates before giving us the ´all clear´ to go ahead and stack away our crockery. If we did not impress them with our eating abilities, back to the dining tables we had to go, until we had finished. There is nothing worse than sitting at a table with a plate of cold nasty food in front of you that has to be eaten, knowing that your friends are outside playing. To watch the dining hall gradually empty and you´re still stuck there, no further forward, is both humiliating and soul destroying, especially if it´s your class´ turn to play on the climbing frame.

One particular Chicken Supreme day, my friends and I had decided enough was enough.

"Let´s just stuff it inside our beakers and turn them upside down," Tracy said.

"Really? But what if we get caught?" Mel glanced around the dining hall to see where the duty teachers were.

"We won´t, they won´t bother to look. I´ve done it before, it´s easy peasy. You just have to look innocent and then they won´t even look at you."

Mel looked at me and I looked at her. We were both thinking the same thing - could we do it and could we get away with it?

"God, I wish I could have my dinners at home," I moaned with my hand over my mouth. A sudden whiff of supreme had come my way.

"Well you can´t, your mum works," Tracy reminded me.

"Oh yeah, what does she do again?" Mel giggled.

"She´s a dinner lady." I breathed in too deeply and felt breakfast wanting to make its reappearance. I sipped some water to wash it back down. "But she works at a posh school and they don´t serve crap like this there."

"Come on, no one´s looking, let´s do it now," Tracy urged us.

With a feeling of renewed hope, we began to scrap the Chicken Supreme into our beakers. I held my breath as the movement agitated the stench even more, but it was thrilling and quite liberating to be almost free of the stuff.

"Leave a small amount on your plates, don´t hide it all and then they think you´ve just left a little bit. They´ll let you pass with just a little bit leftover," Tracy told us.

My, she was clever. I´d have never thought of that.

I turned my beaker upside down. Thank goodness they weren´t glass or clear plastic. I squashed it down a bit further - just to be sure I had the slop securely inside.

Like a little troop of workhouse orphans we clutched our plates and walked carefully to the dirty plate stacking area. Unlike Oliver though, we were certainly not going up to ask for more. My heart was hammering in my chest and my throat felt dry.

To our dismay we were all stopped and made to stand with our plates held out for inspection but even then, we still thought we might just get away with it. The duty teacher eyed us knowingly and our hearts sank to our shoes as she lifted each beaker in turn. The Chicken Supreme loosened and slid out the bottom of each beaker, making the most disgusting sucking noise. Then it hit our plates with a resounding splat - our dinners were served back to us, but now not only did it look like vomit, it was stone cold, thick and sticky vomit.

"Back you go," she said.

I think I cried on my way back to the table, but I ate it. What choice did I have? By this point, I was only thankful that I hadn´t physically thrown-up, because just think of that - how would they have known the difference and I would have ended up with extra to eat then. What was on the plate before me was more than bad enough.

It finally did get me though. After all that time of holding onto my insides in the face of Chicken Supreme, it had the last laugh. Many years later, after a holiday in Greece, I boarded the plane to come home. Half way over Europe, to my horror of all horrors, the meal they served was a definite spin-off of that old school dinner. I peeled back the foil on my small plastic dinner plate, and one look and a whiff was all it took. I threw up heartily into one of those nice handy sick bags they stuff in with the magazines in the back of the seats. It had to happen didn´t it? Sometimes there is nothing you can do about it and you just have to go with the flow - so to speak.


© Carolyn Eddy 2005

Published in Outercast December 2005

Review