Full Beanbag Jacket

Picture the scene:

A quiet little borough of South London, and an equally quiet junior school, whose crowning achievement was that they had found some WW2 era bomb shelters buried beneath it that had been forgotten about.

It had a very active Parent-Teacher association, which always strove for the best for their little pupils, always battling for that little extra piece of funding, bright classrooms, constant school trips, and of course a playground the envy of any of the rival schools.
The school would spare no expense on the playground, with bright coloured hopscotch grids everywhere and of course plenty of toys.
These came in the form of footballs, giant hoops, basketballs, etc…

Then one day the school had a special announcement, they had recently spent hundreds of pounds on beanbags. Literally thousands of colourful beanbags, apparently clueless to the sheer horror they had just unleashed.

Cue an hour of terror the normal man only sees in the likes of Apocalypse Now and Saving Private Ryan.
Within seconds of gaining access to the new “toys”, hundreds of young lads began throwing beanbags at anyone they saw.
Dinner ladies franticly ran around trying to stop the madness, but were forced to retreat under a constant hail of ammunition that’s commonly used by police to subdue large scale riots in the adult world.
The nurse’s office was full, and the girls were herded up in the far end of the higher playground, safely hiding behind the huts.
The playground was thinly scattered with the occasional boy who just wasn’t moving. The next door infant school had brought its children inside, to spare them from being warped by the mayhem they were witnessing.

Soon two major battle lines had formed, separated by a no-mans land that was several metres deep, and contained several lifeless children. Any who strayed into the middle for extra ammunition or to help his unconscious best friend became easy pickings, especially for those younger boys on the other side who didn’t have as strong a throw as the elder years did.

The slaughter continued for an hour, any teachers who went near the window to see what was going on risked their windows being shattered by those lashing out at the authority the teachers commanded over them.
Bright colours filled the sky and brought death from above, pitched battles took place everywhere as huts and hills and the football goal were taken from each other in some savage instinct of territorial warfare, the world moved as a blur, if you got close enough to the enemy it soon turned to hand to hand.
Without any clearly defined enemy, the same kid who helped you defend the bench could be fighting you tooth and nail for the traffic cone. You were too scattered to find any of your friends, and when you did it wouldn’t be long before you were separated as you dived in different directs to escape from a particularly heavy volley.

Then eventually it came, a loud whistle. The fighting died down, as you returned to the classroom, bruised, battered, beaten. Several kids had to have the next few days off school; one or two had broken bones, maybe a concussion here or there. No grudges were held, it was all vs. all and was both pointless and impossible to be bitter about being hit by someone, when it was quite possible that every kid had battled with each other at some point during the madness...

The next day there were no beanbags, and all staff denied their existence, probably explaining their disappearance to the PTA as theft, hundreds of pounds all gone.

That day shall forever haunt me and the hundreds others as our first introduction into the pure blood thirst and violent nature of man.

The horror...
(Danage, Mon 13 Mar 2006, 22:54, Reply)