Dormitories at Kersaliou

It was 8.50 and a small boy approached the staff room. He knocked twice on the door and:

“Entrez.”

He did so and sheepishly approached the long rectangular table.

“Miss Blount wants to know what you want us to do.”

“Ah—never mind about that now Alex, come and sit down here.”

He did so.

“What’s new with the world today? Is God in his heaven?”

An embarrassed silence, a grin and a superb Gallic shrug.

“Tidy the dormitories then and wait there until they are inspected.”

He left and delivered the message to Miss Blount because the scuffle of chairs on the dining room floor, situated nearby, was heard distinctly a minute or two later. The boys would take the spiral stairway to their dormitories. The girls, however, had a much grander approach to theirs—turning left out of the dining room, down the long corridor and then left up the more imposing, much wider stairway.

Dormitories were not just for sleeping in. They were centres of intrigue, laughter, tears and gossip. There were plots to be hatched, plans laid, events discussed and sweets to be eaten. There were friendships to be formed or discarded and reformed; emotions to be expressed; selfish and selfless acts to be committed.

Long before the residential trip to Brittany occurred, the thirty ten to eleven year old children would want to know if they would be allowed to share a dormitory with their friends.

Sometimes, an anxious parent would suggest that their child should or should not be put with another particular individual. The staff, too, would have their own ideas of what the groupings should be in order for harmony to reign. Known saints might nullify boisterous sinners, extrovert peacocks might encourage church mice, benevolent mother figures might nurse and mollify budding hypochondriacs. What was clear, was that in any one dormitory there would be a mixture of the timid and the brash, the wise and the foolish, the clean and the dirty. In short, a group of fairly normal state school children.

Inspections were, usually, light affairs but many of the children loved the competitive aspect.

“Did we beat the other girls’ dormitory?”

“Why have we got only seven out of ten?”

Once a modicum of tidiness had been established, the children were told to go to the classroom downstairs, which was not many metres away from the staff dining room. There, they were given instructions for their morning’s work.