When I was a child, the school which I attended was peculiar yet wonderfully interesting. Whether it was the fact that it was surrounded in places by overgrown bushes and opposite a strangely crooked wood which ignited my imagination, or perhaps the funny, eccentric, and sometimes fearsome teachers and kids which populated it, I do not know. I'm not sure of when it was built, but it certainly stood out from the houses and quiet streets which surrounded it, covered as it was in a bright fiery red paint which drew your eyes to it immediately. There I went from the age of five up until I was eleven or twelve, and like most children, I have both fond and cruel memories of it.
Each day with a rucksack on my back, I would wander past the crooked wood and wave to the 'lollipop lady' Mrs Collins - a kind old woman who's job it was to stop traffic with her bright yellow sign, letting us cross in safety - and after meeting my friends, walk through the rusted brown gates into one of two playgrounds.
It was rumoured that in the past the two grounds existed to separate boys from girls - both an understandable and utterly outdated concept. By the time I had went to the school, the first playground had been assigned for those aged five to eight, the second for those aged eight and up. In the older kids' playground there lay a small red brick building which stood on its own, disconnected from the main school complex. It had long since fallen into disuse, and in fact had been sealed from prying eyes, its doors and windows walled up with stone and mortar making it impossible to see what was inside.
Its purpose seemed a bit of a mystery as most of the teachers seemed to skirt around the topic entirely, but of course stories spread amongst the wild imaginations of children, and in my school this fondness for outlandish tales of tragedy and forbidden places often led to bizarre rumours and whispers, particularly pertaining to the sealed building - obscurity is a fertile ground for the fantastical ruminations of youth.
When me and my and friends were in the younger playground, we would sometimes sneak down a narrow passageway which would lead to the other and peek around the corner. There we would see the older kids playing football or just hanging around - it is amusing how younger children look to their older peers - thinking that they seemed to be having so much more fun than us. But before we would be chased away by the janitor or a passing teacher, my eyes would always lead to that sealed building. There was something lonely about it, isolated, and while it was surrounded by the yells and vibrancy of a school yard, its appearance suggested a grave silence to me.
Some of the older kids liked to scare themselves and us, and told us dramatically that it had been used as a science department and that there had been a hideous accident there, one which had produced strange and gruesome things which had to be kept from the world - even as a child of eight I knew made up nonsense when I heard it. Then there was the account that it had been a previous and rather brutal head teacher's office decades earlier, and that he had died there in a fire. His ghost obviously still haunted the place and it was better that the vengeful old sod be contained there, fuming at his desk as children enjoyed themselves and played nearby - again, utter garbage.
There was, however, one account of why the place had been abandoned which seemed more plausible to me. The building was in fact, a toilet. Yes, a normal toilet. No frills, no secret laboratories, no dead spirits of an overbearing head teacher. It had simply been sealed up when new facilities were installed in the school to stop the children from climbing inside and getting up to mischief. But yet, despite this mundane explanation, there were still in fact tales to be told about the red bricked, disconnected building in the older kids' playground.
Although I had heard the stories, it wasn't until I was in my fourth year at the school that I became intimately and, at the time, uncomfortably involved with it. The older kids' playground was flanked on three sides by a rectangular section of the school itself, with the fourth side separated from neighbouring houses by a mouldy and dark red wall. It was isolated from the other playground - other than the aforementioned passageway - and, to further the feeling of imprisonment, was characterised by tall metal fencing which rose up in places where a brave classmate might have attempted their great escape. Yet, there was one old gate which did allow access of sorts, but like prison guards, the teachers tended to check on it regularly.
