Unofficial Christ's Hospital Forum

jtaylor wrote:I bought some proper wax polish for a wooden table a few years back. When I opened it, it immediately took me back to the smell of the CH dormitories and the main house stairs at the start of a term, after they'd been freshly polished....

At Hertford we had waxed tables in the dayrooms and the wax certainly smelled nothing like Pledge etc. Waxing tables was a favourite punishment for talking after 'lights out'. Shoe polish takes me straight back to the basement in 2's, every evening before supper.

The smell of beeswax takes me back to the Chemistry lab. We had polished wooden tops on the benches, and any unpleasant spills had to be repaired at break, using a lump of beeswax, bunsen burner, rags and elbow grease. It did tend to make one VERY careful with chemicals.

Chrissie Boy wrote: And then there were those wild garlic/cow parsley smells which will always be so closely associated with wandering around the countryside on Sundays. Whenever I catch a nostrilful of 'em, I'm suddenly 13 years old again and hanging around the stream that ran along just inside the ring fence at the Horsham end of the school estate. Does it still exist or has it been landfilled with old fridges and mattresses?
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Rode past doctors lake a couple of weeks ago and even at 40/50mph on a motorbike you can smell the wild garlic, yes the stream is sort of there and unlikely to be touched due to the badgers den in the little valley thing (unless they have dissapeared) as you can't really use the main gate anymore I reckon they are less hassled now.


Another smell is the smell of slightly off creamy milk from when we used to have school farm milk in the bags in the big yellow buckets sat around the brew rooms, and the smell of toast cooked really hard and fast dripping with real butter (those Dualit toasters were very good considering the pounding they took)

Whenever I see a dualit in the posh kitchen shops, I think ' what an incedible amount of money to charge' but then always think of the brew rooms and the fact that they were on pretty constantly for several hours very day - they could certainly take the abuse.

Definitely agree with the milk bags!

This thread does not extend to 'tastes'.....
I remember thickly cut white bread, spread generously with wonderful beef dripping and sprinkled with salt; ice cold milk from metal churns; fried bread spread with CH marmalade. I often try to replicate these delights, but always fail - except sometimes when I am late and my breakfast consists of a banana and a glass of milk straight from the fridge. But the milk does not taste the same...
Kerren

kerrensimmonds wrote:This thread does not extend to 'tastes'.....
I remember thickly cut white bread, spread generously with wonderful beef dripping and sprinkled with salt; ice cold milk from metal churns; fried bread spread with CH marmalade. I often try to replicate these delights, but always fail Kerren

Thank goodness (hmmmm, have been trying to insert 'vomit' smiley, but no luck. Bl%%dy dial-up).

xxx

if you want the CH taste for fried bread try a breakfast from Little Chef or similar, they deep fry the bread and it oozes, you can feel your arteries clogging as you look at it. (for Caroline - what's dial-up?)

Shoe polish takes me straight back to the basement in 2's, every evening before supper.

Absolutely, and the brown polish smears up the back of long socks in winter when we'd not made enough time to do the shoes properly (or even at all!) I remember the old rounded shape shoes that I'd work so hard to get, hated the new pointy ones when they came out and wore my old shape ones until my socks got soaking from the holes in the soles as I was terrified that they wouldn't repair them but would replace them!

if you want the CH taste for fried bread try a breakfast from Little Chef or similar, they deep fry the bread and it oozes, you can feel your arteries clogging as you look at it.

I don't know about Little Chef but school used to deep fry them and then let it go cold in the early morning and would redunk to reheat it in the fryers before it came out - butter and maramalade never tasted so good!!!!

Double dunk fried bread, I'm amazed we could waddle through the doors.

Hmmmm....

I can't believe I spent my time at CH being painfully thin (a condition of which I am now very much cured ho ho)

Can remember being five feet tall and weighing five stone!

Either I didn't tuck in as others did or was so frazzled I burned all the calories straight off again.

Wish I could zap up my metabolism to approaching those levels these days <sigh!>

Liz

I don't think I've ever been revisited by a CH taste. They were thankfully unique. (Was there ever anything like CH roast mutton (apart from old boot leather?)).

But another smell occurs to me: I once picked up a whiff that took me straight back to Friday afternoons (CCF day). It was probably triggered by brass polish, but it brought back a flood of brasso, blanco and blacking.

englishangel wrote:Double dunk fried bread, I'm amazed we could waddle through the doors.

I remember enjoying dipping plain sliced bread into the bacon/sausage/egg fat...

Ermm... what 'egg fat' did they dish up to you at Horsham...?
Or is it the case that there were fryers which catered for sausages and bacon as well as eggs (tho didn't the eggs fall apart?) and that you were allowed to dunk plain bread into the leftover fat afterwards? Yuk! And taking Englishangel's line, What About Cholesterol?!

Cholesterol wasn't invented until the '80s...


I was referring to the fat/oil in which the aforementioned items were swimming and sliding around in the large metal trays in which they were brought to the table.

That's a lot of 'in whiches' but English can be a very difficult language in which to speak sometimes. Trust me, I'm a teacher/translator

Ah Ha.. so it was serving dishes from which the aforementioned items were delivered - not the utensils in which they were cooked. That makes sense...
But hey shouldn't they (the sausages, eggs and bacon) have been better drained before serving....