The Hut

January 10, 2012

This is the tale of a hut. It is one of many, but I suspect it is the first on paper. It took place in a school. It could be any school. I, aged eight or nine, was attending this school. At this school, we used to build these little huts, like inexpert beaver lodges, in the bushy corners of the school's playing fields. There were only two which counted though. To the small tribes dwelling in them, they were known as "the hut" and "the other hut".  These two huts were locked in a permanent civil war. We would haul pine cones and promising sticks out of bush surrounding the school. Sticks were swords and guns, pine cones were money and bombs. We would point the best of the sticks at the enemy and say,"Bang!' They always returned the gesture. Nobody ever actually died, but we kept trying, just in case. Looking back, I find it odd that this game held my attention for so long. Perhaps it was something in the primal act of waving sticks around that reached into my young mind and hit the button marked "fun". Perhaps it was the camaraderie the hut enjoyed. Whatever it was, it was amazing.  Now, at the time, the school was experiencing something of a boom. I didn't realize it at the time, but there were more new students than usual that summer. Several of these had been transferred from nearby schools, and this is where my story really gets off the ground, because included in this latter bunch was a boy named Kyle and Kyle for reasons unknown, joined our hut. Kyle had a face like a large candle left in the oven, a result of some chemical mishap in the womb. We couldn't help but look at him. He drew the eye as if magnetized, and it was this trait which took him straight to the top of our loose hierarchy. It was uncanny. When our hut fell over, we looked to Kyle. When pine cones went missing, we looked to Kyle. Within a fortnight, Kyle and his strange charisma were in charge.  Under the management of Kyle, the hut was built stronger than ever. Pine cone raids were more successful. We of the hut were galvanized. Kyle was Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, Nelson all rolled into one boy with a face like a wax bulldog. We ran against the other hut with unprecedented ferocity, again and again. No prisoners were taken. Several weeks progressed.  The leader of the other hut at this time was a somewhat scrawny creature called George. When we made the final push, ran hooting into the other hut and clashed with his guard, he defended it valiantly to the last. We knocked his hut down and attacked the surrounding trees with sticks. All fell before us. No opposition. We had won. A flag was raised. It glowed in the lunchtime sun. It couldn't last, of course. The hut had won a war that had been raging since the school's earliest days. Over the next month our hut was raided daily. George' s forces established new huts in ever further corners of the school. We knocked them over, one by one, and enlisted his men to our hut. At last, with winter on the horizon, Kyle claimed victory. This was the worst thing that could possibly happen to the hut. It's like the aphorism — the journey is the most interesting part. Sure the hut ostensibly wanted to win, but the primal joy of waving sticks around is removed when there's no one to wave them at. The hut was dead on its feet! It wasn't fun! The end, when it came, was agonizingly slow. People just decided to leave, go and do other things, look for fun elsewhere. Instead of carrying on, the hut decided to lie down and bleed to death. By the time I left, Kyle was long gone. He had gotten into trading cards or something. The hut had died the death of everything that ceases to entertain. I think, though, that it was the right choice for it. I moved on, made new friends, left primary school. But I went back. I walked down there, just last weekend. Somebody had built classrooms all over where the other hut used to be, but in the corner of the big playing field, surrounded by bush, was a little inexpert beaver lodge, the hut of my childhood reborn. Glory forever to the hut!  Tracy McMillan, 2013 Tracy brought her school magazine home today which included this little gem she apparently wrote for an assessment for NCEA Level 1 English, so the scanning and OCR might have left a typo or two in it. The photo I took of a hut at WestWind Recreation Reserve which I had in my archives is of course not representative of these huts that seem to captivate the year 5 & 6 students at the local school.