Mid-90s: slave auction at a girl's school... what could go wrong?

"The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him; they crush those beneath them... allow me to amuse myself a little in the same style..."

Wuthering Heights

Indeed, whilst my friends and I were certainly the brunt of the posse at school it did not stop us all uniting for one rather cruel episode. A bit like the United Nations, but uniting for malevolence rather than peace.

Anyway, in the jolly hockey-sticks tradition of the aspirational but ultimately dull private school, there was always the odd charity event that in hindsight could only be described as morally dubious. The slave auction, the auctioning of teachers to the highest bidder now seems absurd, like the idea of opium-smoking and snuff boxes. However, in this estrogen-loaded environment, slave auctions were deemed permissible and given the fevered hormones, anyone male was always a popular choice. Our class in perhaps the only moment of unity we ever displayed, decided to 'buy' Miss Corbeau [not her real name, but it's hardly a stretch]. Miss Corbeau, in our defence was not a 'nice' person. She had turned up at the high school, having apparently been hounded out of her last job at a school that was yet more small-minded than the one we were in. Teaching us French, something as a school, they did well, Miss Corbeau was both dull, untrusting and had an annoying habit of uttering 'tiens, tiens' after everything she said, for no particular reason. Perhaps she was trying to hang on to her fluency, itself a hallmark of a more exotic period in her life, perhaps it was an oral tic, however it came across as a rather affected, disparaging attack, it's very formula was abrasive, just saying those words out loud isn't satisfying, they don't fill the mouth as some french phrases do, no, it was simple and grating: "tiens tiens!" and reminded us, surly as we were, of being told off by someone else's mother. It's fair to say we despised her intently. That we despised her says something about the arrogance of youth and the central position we allocated ourselves in judging all that was, or was not reasonable. The facts that we were brats aside, she does seem in hindsight to have been rather small-minded and ungenerous but this does not justify the zeal we which decided to wear her down.

So the slave auction...

to be continued...