A R C

I recall at my Public School there was a small group that would invariably get into trouble with the prefects/monitors. It was one day that we realised that the brick wall to the side of the tennis courts by the boarding house was in fact an old Air Raid Shelter from WWII. We did a brief recce, and found that the doorways had been bricked up, so we decided to opt for a far more covert method of entry to our new realm. A trap door was procured, and a hole was made in an end of the building that was veiled by a row of conifers. The trap door was placed in its new home with a string allowing for quick entry and exit, further camouflaged by the evergreens. It was painted to fit in with brick work of the shelter, with the addition of some believeable offensive grafitti anouncing us all to be 'posh twats'. So our small group of friends suddenly went from being in trouble every lunch time and break (smoking, bunking our of school, etc.) to never in trouble. This eventually lead to 'where the hell are they?' type of questions between the teaching staff and presumably their minions the prefects. They would hunt high and low through the building to see where we were hiding, sent hunter killer missions to the local parks to catch us carrying out some terrible crime, but to no avail, while we would casually sit in our plush shelter (it was now wall to wall carpeted!!!!) occasionally using a golf periscope to spy on the surrounding area. Of course as the axiom goes 'all good things cannot last!!!!', and we were caught and hauled before the head of the middle school. Usually we would get a serious telling off, but all of us could tell that there was an air of admiration for our endeavour. We were dealt with lightly, no one knows exactly why, tho' the fact that our headmaster was SOE in WWII, may have played a part. Long live the memory of the Air Raid Council...