Chapter 27 Chapter 3 boudoir of eighteen beds

Throughout middle school, every Saturday afternoon at 3:30 was the time we eagerly looked forward to going home. ——For decades, at this time of day, I still look forward to something happy. Because Nankai Middle School is built in the suburbs, all students are required to live on campus. My family lives outside Erli Road, so they must also live on campus.At that time, vehicular traffic was almost impossible, the wartime slogan: "a drop of gasoline, a drop of blood", and I have never heard of anyone with a private car at home. Each room in the female dormitory has eighteen wooden beds, six in each of three rows, and only one person can walk in the middle.There is a small wooden box under the bed to store clothes.Self-study in the morning and evening is managed in the same way as in class. You can go home at 3:30 pm on Saturdays and return to school at 6:00 on Sundays.

The six years I lived in the dorms seemed to grow up in a large family, filled with memories of group discipline and conflicting personal interests, and the most fun times were early in the morning and after lights out at night. During the war, large-scale institutions and schools all used trumpet blowing to set the time for daily living and get out of class.Because I can't afford a big clock when I migrate, let alone dream of an electronic clock.Every day at six o'clock in the morning, before dawn, the reveille sounded shrill and persistent.We struggled to get out of the bed bugs, especially in the winter.When queuing up on the playground, the fog in the mountain city is often so thick that the faces of the neighbors cannot be seen clearly.Before the morning exercises, Wang Wentian, the director of the Women's Middle School, often gave lectures.Almost everyone will never forget her saying to us: "Grass grows in the heart, smoke comes out of the head!" For some reason, when this lesson is repeated many years later, everyone will laugh for a while and be very happy.

In those years, not only the girls were afraid of her, but the boys were also extremely afraid of her. The timid ones didn't dare to enter the gate of the Girls' Middle School until they graduated.I still have an unsolved mystery about how a stern woman like her (we call her the Sphinx behind her back), a scary person who graduated from the first class of the girls' middle school and studied in Germany, how could she die in her forties? Married (continued by famous scholar Li Shuhua)?Years later.I went to New York to see her when I was in my forties, she opened the door, I just said: "Do you remember me?" She shed tears and said: "Oh, why don't I remember you rascals?" , as soon as she opened her mouth in the fog, everyone immediately forgot the dream of last night. Her voice was like a small steel cannon. In Tianjin, we are "too wild to save." How could she remember us with such a warm "naughty boy" image?

The richer and more interesting dormitory life comes after the weak lights are turned off.Sleep does not necessarily follow the darkness. On nights without a big moon, when we are sure that the alarm will not run, this is the only time for the people on the eighteen wooden beds to talk.Seventeen- and eight-year-old girls, of course, look forward to love, and hints of love can be found between the lines in the books inside and outside of class (there were very few "express" in those days), and the poems and songs are all sad situations for the spring and autumn.But in the middle school environment at that time, "talking" about love was not allowed, and no one dared to admit that there was someone in love. If they dared to admit that they were in love, they would probably have to be expelled.

The biggest annoyance of dorm life is bedbugs.The bedbugs in the Nankai Middle School building were very serious.When we got home, our luggage was not allowed to enter the house. We had to put it in the yard to dry first, and then the quilt was removed for washing. If there were bedbugs, we threw them away. Sometimes even the books were full of bedbugs.Mr. Zhang Zhongmou's autobiography also wrote about the bedbugs in Nankai Middle School and mentioned how they protested to the school. In order to deal with bedbugs, every few weeks, three or four of us girls carried our wooden bed boards to the steam room next to the boys’ dormitory to fumigate the bedbugs on the bed boards, which would more or less fume some of the bugs.It was later found to be useless, because the bedbugs had already entered the floor and ceiling, and it was impossible to dismantle the house and burn it.At night, the dormitory will turn off the lights one or two hours before the exam. When we turn on the lights and fight at night, we will see the horrible scene of a bunch of bedbugs crawling down along the wires on the light bulb without a lampshade and directly connected to the wires. Even on the floor there are countless bedbugs crawling from the feet.

We can only sleep while being tickled and scratched by bugs, and none of us will never forget it.Bedbugs were helpless, and the school couldn't deal with them, because there was no way to disinfect them at that time.There was no "DDF" during the Anti-Japanese War. If there was, it would be something miraculous.It wasn't until we graduated and left that we were free from the threat of bed bugs.As for mosquitoes and flies, let alone.Even so, Nankai is already considered a very particular school, and there are gauze covers in the dining room.It's just that no matter how particular you are, you can't stop the hygiene problems in a difficult environment.Thinking back to our teenage years, there wasn't a single person who wasn't bitten by bedbugs.It's not easy.Alas, the bedbugs, which are as nasty as the Japanese planes, entangled us almost overwhelmingly.Another nightmare, and if I start writing them I'm afraid I won't be able to stop.Those years were all resisted by young flesh and blood.