11. A Midnight Feast

I was given the Malory Towers set for my 10th birthday and I was hooked. I loved reading about Darrell and all her boarding school adventures, especially the midnight feasts. They sound like so much fun, so daring and exciting. While I’m reading, I imagine myself there, sitting in a stationery cupboard giggling and eating sweets and cake in the middle of the night with all my dorm mates. Such a far cry from my life at home where I share a room with my little sister and I never have friends over to play. My parents chose an American school in Paris. Marymount, a modern-day convent for American expat children. The thing is, my mother doesn’t like Americans, as you know, so she doesn’t encourage play dates. It’s a lonely existence, just me and my sister who is five years my junior, in a posh arrondissement in the centre of the city. Life at boarding school sounds so appealing. I imagine being with friends all the time and it sounds heavenly.

One night, after lights out, Caz makes a pronouncement. We should raid the larder and take some tuck down to the geography store room for a midnight feast, she proposes. I am definitely in! Yes, yes yes. I really want to have a midnight feast. Emma agrees as do Amanda and Nicky.

We talk about it for days. We plan what we will eat and drink. We set out a meticulous timeline, detailing what we will buy in town and which items we will steal from the larder. It’s not really stealing, we convince ourselves, as our parents have paid for all the food the school buys anyway. Our feast menu reads as follows:

Monster munch - pickled onion flavour

Flying saucers

Aniseed balls

Crunchies

Jaffa Cakes

Ribena

And a loaf of bread and some jam from the school larder.

We are all set for the next night. We know we will have to wait until it’s late, as close to midnight as we can. Webb and Dodds don’t go off duty until about 11pm, we think. We are determined to make it until midnight and we plan to set an alarm for 11.45pm, just in case we fall asleep. We have stashed the goodies under Caz’s bed and all we have to do when the time comes is stop off at the larder to get the bread and jam before making our way to the geography cupboard.

We are so giddy we can’t sleep. We whisper excitedly, checking our watches every 10 minutes. Gradually though we all feel sleepy and drop off. I wake with a start as Caz is shaking me by the shoulder.

“Come on,” she whispers. “Wake up, it’s time”

One by one we wake the others up and gather our feast. We are half asleep but also excited and a little scared. If we get caught we will be in huge trouble. It doesn’t bear thinking about, so I don’t think about the possible consequences.

We tiptoe as quietly as we can down the stairs through the classroom wing towards the kitchens. Everyone knows that the larder key is hanging on a hook just by the door, which is exactly where we find it. We lock the door behind us and replace the key, a large, crusty, fluffy loaf of bread in one hand and a jar of strawberry jam in the other.

We’re soon sitting in a row in the geography cupboard. I’m next to the dupliacting machine, which is smelly and digging into my shoulder blade and we’re surrounded by piles of dusty books and boxes of rocks and other materials. No one is hungry. I’m not in the mood for any of the tuck we have laid out before us. I so want to eat but I feel a bit queasy at the thought. Is it the nerves? Or the time of night? We try to make jokes and offer the food around but it’s just not as much fun as we’d imagined. We’re all a bit cold, sitting on the floor in our nighties and dressing gowns. This part of the school isn’t heated at all after the school day ends and the stone floor is freezing. We’re not sure what to do. This is not at all how it was at Malory Towers. They ate cake and anchovies at midnight and sounded like they were having a ball! The thought of even one bite of chocolate turns my stomach.

After about 15 minutes Nicky says she doesn’t feel very well, her tummy hurts, and we all rush to suggest we head back to the dorm. We stuff the goodies back into the bags and make our way down the corridors, a quiet, sad row of little girls, shoulders hunched, disappointed and disenchanted.

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I'm still a very capable party planner. It's the part of parties I like best, the planning. I don't often like the talking to people bit all that much. But I love the imagining and the oragnising. I love coming up with the perfect menu. I love making lists of things to buy, bake, cook and prepare. I like planning every little detail meticulously. When our children were little we had an annual Hanukkah party. I woud make doughnuts and cheese straws and latkes, endless platters of little swirly pastries with pesto, mini frittatas, a huge platter of crudités with aïoli or houmous and lemonade and mulled wine. All home made. Every bit of it. The preparations would start weeks before and the party itself always felt like a bit of an anti-climax. I am not good at small talk, I perfer to walk around handing out drinks and delicious things to eat and I usually hang out in the kicthen, that's definitely my favourite place.

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