By Everett – Grade 5
Imagine having to go outside to a wooden outhouse, when everyone knew that you “had to go”! When Garnet Nix was a little boy, about 7 or 8 yrs old, he went to a one-room schoolhouse. With 15 to 20 students, of all ages and grades, boys and girls shared one teacher. The school didn’t have any indoor toilets, just outhouses. There was a boy’s outhouse and a girl’s outhouse. On the girl’s outhouse the wood was rotten and there were holes on the back wall.
In the schoolyard the grass grew really long, and at recess Garnet and his friends would pick long pieces of grass. Every time they saw a girl go into the outhouse, they would slide the piece of grass through one of the holes in the back wall, and tickle the girls bums while they were going to the bathroom! Garnet and his friends thought it was really hilarious because the girls would scream and go running out of the outhouse.
One day, a friend of Garnet´s went and stuck a piece of grass through a hole in the back wall of the outhouse to tickle a girl’s bum. The friend heard a girl scream. To his surprise, it was not a girl running out of the outhouse – it was his teacher! The teacher was really angry. She went to the school Trustees. One of the Trustees was Garnets dad! The teacher demanded that the outhouse get fixed, and the Trustees had the outhouse renovated. Also, all the boy’s got the strap.
The boys weren’t happy about getting the strap, so when the teacher was having her lunch, the boys stole the strap! The boys went down the road to a construction site where workers were building a bridge over the Humber River. The boys threw the strap into the freshly poured concrete and the teacher never saw the strap again.
