The Weirdest Thing

[BIAD]

...So now my question to all of you... have you had a similar experience yourself, or know of anyone who has?

He's got one -he's got one!! BIAD shouts at me and claps his red-nailed hands in excitement!

When I was around ten years-old, the school I went to had an odd way of feeding the children it educated.
This was the late-sixties, dinosaurs walked the earth then and our only hope was that Ninurta would shoot
them all by the time we reached adulthood.

In the UK back then, my education level was classed as a 'Junior School'... the place after what Americans
call Elementary school and before Junior High. I guess?

For the particular one I went to, the dining room was nicknamed 'The Canteen' because it wasn't located on
the property, but four hundred yards away up a back-alley and beside a dilapidated saw-mill.
(Don't worry, there's no mention of flat-capped street urchins or child chimney-sweeps coughing soot onto the
knickerbockers of the well-dressed gentry! Crikey...! I'm not that old!)

As this place also had enough space to add three classrooms to it, for one term, children learning in these
classes, rarely visited the main school building and this was where the future landlord of Boy In A Dress partly
left this dimension and visited another.

The Canteen has a yard where the children could play and where myself and three friends would fart about
in the pretence we knew how the world worked. Outside toilets were the norm back then and an excellent place
to bully others by blocking the doorway.

Granted, the girl you fancied... no, that would be wrong at that age. The girl that made your young body feel
strange and cause you to lie in bed at night, smiling at the ceiling at the daring to add your own surname at
the end of her first name... well, she got a pass and was allowed entry, of course.

With having three classes on the premises, it goes without saying that a trio of teachers were needed.
See, my arithmetic still works!
I cannot recall the names of the two female tutors, but the male that taught my pals and me was a tall...
very tall man called 'Mr. Carr'

If you can imagine a seven... maybe even twenty-foot tall Hugh Jackman-looking man with hair combed to
the side and never without a tie, that was Mr. Carr. Maybe the height-thing is connected to the fact of me just
being a kid at the time, but he was a big 'un!

My chums (really?!)... my friends and I had been up to something that's been lost in the midst of time and
whatever it was, we were caught doing it. The punishment for the unknown deed was that we would miss the
final break or 'playtime' and have to individually stand in the four corners of the corridor that connected the
dining area, the cloakroom (remember those?!) and the classrooms.

The teachers drank their clear-glass cups of milky coffee in one the classrooms and during their conversations
that only grown-ups understand, would glance out through the little window panes in the door.

There's only so much a wall can relate to the viewer with his nose close-up to it. A child's undeveloped mind
misses the nuances of a plasterer's art or a carpenter's concern of getting waist-high wainscot to look straight.
So there I stood, envious that my friends were closer to each other than I and whispering of things only kids
deem important.

The next part, I have never understood. I asumed I was just daydreaming and for the life of me, I can't fully recall
what I perceived during the ten minutes before I heard the single clank of the 'break-over' bell being picked up.
I can vaguely remember that I couldn't see my hands for some reason, my face felt heavy below my eyes.
But... that's it.

Usually after the coffee is gone, a hand-bell would be taken out into the yard by a teacher and shaken several
times and then the -hopefully racing children would be orded into three lines ready to re-enter their respective
classes.
And this is how it went, a female teacher went outside with the dangling bell and the four of us awaited the
usual dressing-down from the handsome giant who occasionally punished us with a wooden metre-ruler.

Knowing the routine, we slowly turned to face Mr. Carr and he said in his deep voice:
"Gelguware meeth parsay-tome, Noogle gorth corrinion?"

My fellow bad-boys kept their eyes to the herring-bone design of the wooden floor and replied individually with
"Marthor booth, terregan whey" and possibly 'Thoffee Kork deliminum"
Mr. Carr looked sternly at me and growled "Jinjoo ballancka?" and waited for a response.

I couldn't believe it! My world, the place that I knew would always be there... just like the steelworks that clanged
through the night and my favourite solitary tree that sat on a hill nearby, my world had suddenly changed!
(Both now long-gone, by the way)

The air going into my lungs was the same and the familiar surroundings hadn't altered. But strangely, my body felt
just off-to-the-left and urgently needed wearing properly again!
The wee-small voice that kids never listen to, told me that even if with all the physical information in, there's a good
chance, I wasn't fully 'here'.

My friends gazed at me as if I'd yanked my short-trousers down and had written the name of a secret sweeheart
on my underpants... in shiny sequins!! I spluttered and obviously staring back with wide eyes, I attempted to explain
that they had become aliens. "I...I don't understand what you're saying" I stammered.

Mr. Carr pulled his head back and frowned in confusion. "Chiggy-matt, day-day soothat?" he said in the manner
of those residing on Pluto and I guess he could see my true feelings as my panicking features were becoming
more pronounced.

I honestly felt as if I was in another room looking out from two kid-sized peepholes at an alien world that wore
human faces. My body was still slightly in front of me and the feeling of being elsewhere was so strong, I think that
if I'd been older, I may have turned around and fled to whatever was behind me.
That's if there was a 'whatever''

Mr. Carr had closed the space between us and leaning down from the place where seagulls fly and snow rarely
melts, he said in a soft -but dark voice:
"Walla kin go-go and tired of every day, you and this lot here..." Mr. Carr swung a thirty foot-long arm away to indicate
who he meant, "...causing trouble and having to litter the corridor with your presence"

Narrowly missing the MIR Space Station that hadn't been invented yet, my lanky mentor resumed his height among
the solar system. Mr. Carr ascended into the heavens and yet, his brooding looks stayed here among the plebs.

"Now get into class and I don't want to hear a peek of you unless it's to answer a question, okay?" he said and
all four of us knew that the last part wasn't an invite into debating whether his statement was fair or functionable.

Later, after school and when the early-evening calls to the young for acts of mischief and bravado, the three boys
who will always have a place in my heart, asked me what had happened.
I just couldn't tell them.

There's another tale that I told on the website before this one, an incident -where as a kid, I met a Priest who told
me he was Jesus. The way I felt then was the same way I felt when the group of males in a school corridor decided
to talk gobbledegook.

It was terrifying and even though I can rationalise now that some young man in a religious outfit was trying to scare
some snot-nosed kid nursing a cut hand into thinking of a God, the event where people I trusted suddenly became
citizens of Mercury for a few minutes, is still a mystery to me.

But it wasn't them... it was me. It was somewhere I accidentally gone and struggled to get back from.