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At our school, the drunken focal point was an event called House Singing. Golly it was fun. Once a year, each house prepared a pop song and performed it in front of the rest of the school in the grand old assembly hall. Teachers judged which was the least bad (they were all bad). Our house definitely performed Blur’s ‘Parklife’ and ‘Come On Eileen’ by Dexys Midnight Runners — I can’t remember the others. Not remembering much was one of the principles of House Singing, and anyway, for the pupils the music was entirely incidental to the main activity: drinking as much as you could get away with.
It was held at 7 p.m. on a Friday before half-term. Lessons finished at four, so everyone had a three-hour window to tank up before things kicked off. The school was half-day, half-boarding, so older boys went to the shops while others ransacked their parents’ fridges the night before. Rucksacks clinked heavily with bottles of Smirnoff Ice and cheap white wine. By the time the ceremony started, the school had transformed into a 700-strong mob wailing out-of-tune chart numbers. Only the thinnest pretence of order was maintained.
A survey of my friends revealed an astonishing variety of ‘drunk at school’ stories. Beneath the patina of bravado they displayed an impressive amount of nous, brio and entrepreneurial spirit. Nod-and-a-wink agreements with pub landlords. Tactics for avoiding breath-alysers. Effective breath fresheners. Tales of camaraderie to rival the Vietnam war. Lessons in talking to adults: one respondent said that, after one spree, he confessed that lots of the wine had been drunk alongside tiramisu.
‘Was it dry or sweet wine?’ the master inquired.
‘A sauvignon blanc.’
‘A sauvignon blanc, with tiramisu? What kind of an idiot does that?’
There were get-rich-quick schemes, too. The Licensing Act 2003 made it easier for local authorities to stop schools from running bars, and many of the old ones were shut (hence why the Rugby and Ampleforth bars made the news). One way around this was a token system, where parents could buy a certain number of tokens for use at school. Of course, in these places a ‘roaring black market’ in tokens, as one of my respondents put it, immediately sprang up. One correspondent said he worked out how to forge them. We wonder where the British Mark Zuckerbergs are: in boarding schools is the answer, finding out ways to smuggle cans of Red Stripe to the fourth-formers. The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well.
More than that, however, school drinking is the best kind of drinking. All of booze’s rich promise is realised between 13 and 18, when going on the piss is reckless, romantic and free of serious consequences, chiefly hangovers. At school we could run to the pub at 4.30 p.m. and drink six of the house ales — vile, but even in 2003 priced at a keen 99p before 5 o’clock — and get up at 7 a.m. to finish homework before assembly without even the faintest hint of a hangover. If I tried to pull that kind of stunt off today I’d probably have to take the day off.
Like so many great traditions, House Singing couldn’t last. Someone was sick on the shoes of the headmaster, a fine educator but not the kind of man on whose shoes it was advisable to be sick. The girls’ boarding house came in for a certain amount of unsavoury leering. The event was first moved to midweek and then retired altogether. Many schools have yet to return to the kind of bar system they had for much of the last century.
I would like to say that, like a huge game of adolescent drunkenness whack-a-mole, the drunkenness now simply appears somewhere else, but the facts aren’t on my side. British young people are better behaved than they have been for years. According to the ONS, in the past decade the number of teetotal 16- to 24-year-olds has risen 40 per cent. In a permissive era, young people are rebelling with less shagging, booze and drugs than they’ve had for years.
‘I haven’t done the research myself, but my instinct is that they are getting better behaved,’ confirms Lashbrook. ‘The other day I had a dinner for the prefects and I’d say more than half of them stuck to soft drinks.’ For the decreasing numbers of his charges caught on the sauce, sanctions still apply. He says that while they have sanctions for being drunk or more seriously for supplying drink, ‘the biggest mistake a teenager can make is not learning from the first one’.
Not learning from our mistakes: a justification for escalating punishment and a good summary of the human condition — best learned with a packet of crisps.
Because you read about alcohol
Also by Ed Cumming
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