Our dinner ladies at school were a hard breed. A lifetime spent dealing with mouthy kids had made them tough. We thought they were impossibly old but I bet they were just in their 40s, if that.
Every lunchtime they’d herd us in groups into the dining hall, always dressed in the same blue checked lightweight overcoats. As if you could mistake them for anyone else, they always wore the same things.
Anyway, our (the rock lads) favourite was one short woman. We never knew her real name but we called her Budgie for the justifiable reason that she looked like a budgie, with a beak-like nose. She didn’t actually have wings, though we liked to pretend she did but hid them inside her coat.
We used to joke around with her and she seemed to take a shine to us, often letting us in early because we were always hungry. As was typical, one or more of us would be carrying an album to play on the lunch break, which was how we got our moniker ‘the rock lads’ - given to us by Budgie. We loved it and I think we thought it gave us some sort of status.
She would always take hold of the album and looked at it like it was a mysterious artefact. She usually didn’t know the band from the title of course and we thought it hilarious that a band called Live Dates had made an album called Wishbone Ash or that Octoberon’s latest record was called Barclay James Harvest.
One day, shortly before the summer break, which always seemed to create a febrile atmosphere in the school, the summer stretched out in front of us. We were, as we usually were, playing records over the school speakers. On this occasion it was Jeff Beck and Jan Hammer’s live album, me typically loving jazz rock had brought it in.
At lunchtime, the dinner ladies also patrolled around the school and yards keeping a bit of a lid on bad behaviour as well as stopping the smokers. The second track on side 2 Scatterbrain was on when Budgie approached us, which was quite unusual really, most people gave us a wide berth, fearing our withering dissection of their taste in music. We were not exactly experienced in anything but even we could tell when someone was drunk. She started high kicking and clapping her hands to the music. ‘It’s a good one this, lads,’ she said excitedly.
Of course we goaded her on to ever more extravagant dance moves until the Deputy Head intervened and broke it up, guiding her away, returning later to say she wasn’t well. We didn’t believe him for a moment. When one of our number voiced the idea that she was pissed as a fart, he received a detention and six of the best for his troubles.
We never saw her again after that. If they sacked her for dancing to Jeff Beck, it seemed rather unfair. I’d think spending your days herding a mass of hair, spots and records was enough to drive anyone to drink.
