The Zone
I went to a boarding school. Yeah, I know, bumming fags in the showers who burnt your toast, very funny. One of the ways in which the school attempted to "give back to the community" was to run a charity fair every November, at which each boarding house would be tasked with providing some kind of paid entertainment, with the profits going to a worthy local cause. On the one hand this promoted leadership and entrepreneurial spirit among the boys but, honestly, its true value to the school was that it soaked up a lot of idle hands in painting "Soak a teacher!!" signs and constructing rat-whacking tubes, which would otherwise have been vandalising school property or, frankly, lifting cheap lagers in the pub.

The top earner at the fair was always the raffle, for which one dull but eminently profitable house had been granted some kind of unofficial monopoly, but attaining second place was a hotly contested challenge which many boys took quite to heart. The year before I started, my house had offered "put out the candle with the water pistol" which, due to a lack of advance experimentation, turned out to be so easy it actually made a loss. The following year, we did a rowing machine challenge which very few people were energetic enough to actually pay for. It wasn't going well.

The following year was time for a shake up. One evening two senior boys were tooling around the corridors on their usual bedtime-enforcement rounds, armed as was the custom with rolled up copies of The Sun. While causing actual injury was generally frowned upon, landing a good whack with the masthead, leaving !AHCTOG or similar imprinted on an arm or a trouser leg was usually enough to send all but the hardiest of tardy first years scampering for the safety of their duvet. It also had the satisfying side effect of being quite the stress reliever for strung-out A level students.

Discussion between the prefects had turned to the charity fair and what kind of activity teenage boys might pay money to enjoy when one of them, it remains unclear exactly who, looked down at the paper staff in his hands and was struck with inspiration. Rolled-newspaper gladiatorial combat.

The school's theatre studio was promptly booked, for a "performance art installation" according to our housemaster, being perfectly proportioned and having a suitably dramatic entrance corridor which we resolved should be almost unlit to heighten the anticipation. We collected "safety equipment" in the shape of pillows, which were to be strapped to competitors with two of the fattest kids' belts, and two plastic helmets, stolen from the housemaster's children and labelled inside "NOT SAFETY EQUIPMENT, FOR PLAY ONLY". We installed as many strobes as my mates could "borrow" from the theatre supplies department and Ollie the mad Swiss exchange student was recruited to play the loudest German techno in his collection. And, yes, much time was spent crafting the large, blood-spattered sign welcoming all comers to... THE ZONE.

In the days leading up to the big event all newspaper recycling stopped and piles of copies of The Times and its brethren started to build up in the common room. On the night before we stayed up until the small hours rolling, taping and cramming into plastic bins the glorious weapons of traditional schoolboy combat. As we worked, excitement grew - this was going to be the ultimate, the break-out event of the fair. We speculated on how, many generations hence, we would be lauded as heroes for inventing the greatest stall that charitable school events had ever seen. Occasional bouts of "product testing" were broken up by industry-oriented prefects, determined to take the raffle down. We weren't going for second place, we were going to own the afternoon.

The fair opened at 11am. I was one of the first to try out the experience, and went in with Arthur, a good friend against whom I bore no malice. I had pillows strapped to me front and back, the helmet placed on my head and was handed a rolled paper which I noted with some satisfaction was a good broadsheet of considerable density, probably rolled by an older boy.

The first blow caught me by surprise with its ferocity. The disorienting blare of "Eins, zwei, Polizei" made the flashing, oppressive room into some kind of personal hell, like being waterboarded with sound and light and I hadn't had time to get myself ready. I struck back, catching a sideways impact on Art's arm and pillow, so hard the newspaper sabre bent halfway down. He caught me on the head and the helmet immediately cracked, pinching my face on the rebound. Bastard! I smacked him in the face, then whirled it around and got him in the back of the knee, making him stagger backwards. He clocked his head on a supporting beam and dropped like a sack of rocks. I was triumphant, but he was faking, rolling over twice to strike me in the midriff right below my trusty pillow and knocking the wind out of my lungs in an instant. I felt myself falling away from him, stumbling in the flashing darkness as I attempted to stay upright, then as I saw him rush in for the kill I managed to swing at just the right moment and connect with his shoulder, a glancing blow which simultaneously moved him sideways and pushed me in the other direction, right into an open store-room door. Or maybe one of Olly's speakers. I don't know, all I know is it hurt like a bastard and I was having the best time of my life.

Anyway, after about 60 seconds of this we were pulled apart by force, stripped of our frayed swords and safety equipment and bundled out of the door, blinking in the bright autumn sunlight. Outside, The Zone had been open barely fifteen minutes and there was already a queue. By noon the line was round the side of the building and into the quad and people were actually blocking other stalls to queue for THE ZONE. This continued all day. Adolescent boys' thirst for beating the shit out of their mates had far exceeded our wildest expectations.

In the end, sadly, the profit just wasn't there; we only had so many hours in the day and, even though we were busy all day, with a two minute turn around time it was just impossible to make all the 50ps add up fast enough. A brief experimentation with a higher fee nearly caused a riot from those who'd been queueing for the lower price, and putting people in more than four at a time made getting in to break up the resulting brawl almost impossible. It was a brilliant business plan, exploiting the inexhaustible resource of schoolboy violence, and held back only by the limitations of practical reality.

Out of over 1,000 pupils I think only a small minority didn't visit THE ZONE, even if it was just the viewing gallery, and for days afterwards talk was of little else. Those who'd braved the plastic helmets bore cuts on their faces which were worn with pride. We thought we were the arm-baring guy out of that speech in Henry V. "THESE SCARS WON I IN THE ZONE". It was, of course, subsquently banned by the school and never happened again but there is a small slice of the UK population who will never forget that glorious day when entrepreneurship overtook the authorities just long enough to prove that when it comes to physical violence against each other, teenage boys have no limits.
( pineapplecharm D d M Y, H:i, Mon 22 Jul 2013, 11:51, 4 replies)

L.I.T.S
I'd have gone with more of the bumming fags in the showers.
( d.r._and_quinch when will you be famous?, Mon 22 Jul 2013, 14:14, closed)

Please don't post anything ever again.

( Fucking hell Jeff I am not a robot, Mon 22 Jul 2013, 19:01, closed)

Fight you for it?
I must warn you, I have form and a copy of the Metro.
( pineapplecharm D d M Y, H:i, Mon 22 Jul 2013, 23:35, closed)

Ignore him
Please post again many times, that was great!
(Dr Skagra glorious glargzhem, Wed 24 Jul 2013, 20:05, closed)