My own milk-related anecdote


Seeing as the web is awash with people relating various milk-related anecdotes,
I thought I would relate my own.
..

At my boarding school we had little or no pocket money, and little or no access to food outside of school meals. We spent most of our lives in ravenous torment, with ever-growling hollow stomachs.


One summer night, aged 14 or so, I was out wandering the deserted town at the crack of dawn and smoking my umpteenth fag when I saw a milk float stop outside my elderly science teacher's house. I ducked behind a hedge, and when it had gone I sneaked over and helped myself to the bottle of orange juice that had been left along with the milk, before vanishing back to bed for a few snatched hours of sleep before being awoken for breakfast.


About a week later I hatched upon an excellent idea. That night I went back to the teacher's house and placed next to his milk order a list of various food items like bread, butter and eggs. Then I waited in the hedge until I saw the milkman come and go. The next night I returned once again and waited until the milkman made his new 'extra' delivery - which I then spirited away, returning to the dormitory as a food-laden hero. Of course the teacher was none the wiser, and soon I was placing ridiculously large 'orders' on the teacher's doorstep, and waiting nightly with a crowd of other boys in the bushes for the milk float to come whirring down the empty road. This continued to snowball until, inevitably, the teacher was horrified (and mystified) to receive his quarterly bill, totalling a few hundred pounds.

After this, the local police began escorting the milk float around in their panda car for a few weeks, and we moved on to more direct ways of obtaining extra food, such as simply breaking into our school kitchens.

5 comments:

Gareth Williams said...

No wonder Britain had an empire what with education like that.

worm said...

exactly! one day it's a loaf of bread and a pint of orange juice, the next it's the Indian sub-continent

Gadjo Dilo said...

Good heavens. These are the sort of life skills that I patently failed to learn during the formative years. You could have gone a stage further and changed the milkman's order at the depot (and the depot's order to the suppliers) to truffles, pate de fois gras, etc.

Brit said...

Commendable ingenuity. I was a day pupil at a small mixed boarding school; and I could well remember the haunted, starving looks of the boarders. They would literally eat anything.

Susan said...

Curiously inventive! I have to confess to stealing at least one bottle of milk from a doorstep during my university days. When I first started working in London I was amused to find there was a milkfloat with 'Mayfair' emblazoned across the top. I bet the Mayfair milkman has some curious tales to tell...