Now here are some hard characters hanging around down in the basement corridor just opposite the doorway into the boys' locker room! Bernd Schalke is on the right hand end. Bernd was a motorcycle rider. Was it a Norton 650, Bernd? In the centre is Peter Barr.
Between Peter and Bernd is Trevor Anderson. Trevor was very active in Scouting. In the early seventies the distinctive outline of Trevor appeared in the West End of Vancouver. The author was living in the West End while employed by the Xerox Corporation in the caldron of downtown Vancouver. While walking home late one afternoon, he espied Trevor outside a Robson Street hotel where he was staying during a high level Scouting meeting. A chat followed. A chat with Bernd in 2003 revealed that Trevor had become a millwright and had a great facility of his own. He was living on Vancouver Island. Bernd had visited him. Trevor didn't seem to be at either of the reunions.
Do you recall the introduction of the one way traffic pattern imposed by Chas? Seeing these guys standing around down here brings back that memory and in its train the delightful incident of the condom. Down in the basement corridor, where these guys are hanging around, only students travelling west were permitted during class changes. East bound traffic was required to use the main floor. There were fire doors down here. Do you recall the time when some wit closed one of these doors behind him and caused a horrific traffic jam?
It wasn't that the door had been locked, oh no. The door had simply been closed with a condom stretched over the knob on the "upstream" side. It was girls arriving at the closed door who first discovered this and stood around refusing to touch it. Since it was stretched over the knob, they couldn't open the door. The guys arriving behind them thought that the situation was hilarious and would not open the door for them or remove the offending object.
Because of the one-way traffic edict, there was no flow of traffic in the opposite direction to open the door from the other side. Students built up in a traffic jam behind this knot of femming girls and sniggering boys in such numbers that the line up extended all the way back through the basement and up into the inter building corridor and nearly into the new classroom block (your author was in that part of the line up).
This simple mechanism and Chas' one way rule had constipated traffic in the entire school!
The traffic jam worsened and worsened until finally a custodian arrived to pull off the condom and open the door. Half the school was late for the next class. As it happened, the webmaster's next class was with Woolends. Under Chas' traffic scheme, his room was as far away as possible from the new building. The usually prompt webmaster, the last of a string of stragglers dribbling into his room, entered and launched an explanation. Evidently the custodian had called up to the office and the office had already told the tale to the staff. A not unamused Wollends cut short the explanation with a stifled smirk.
