Stinky Cheese

Cindy Neilson’s parents let her throw a pool party for her birthday every summer. The Neilsons had a big inground pool with a high fence around it. So if you weren’t invited to the party, you couldn’t see it, just hear the splashing and laughing on the other side of the wood. Deedee and I had been invited to Cindy’s Seventh Birthday pool party in grade one. So I just assumed I was on the guest list in grade two. But everything changed that year with The Farmer in the Dell. And “Stinky”.

I already knew what Cindy and the Pool Party Club were capable of. I watched her call poor Margery Whithall a fat elephant in first grade. In front of everybody at recess. Margery tried to look like she didn’t care. But she ate Fudgicles and Rollos all through the summer holidays. When she came back for grade two, she had doubled in size. I never thought that could happen to me. I never thought I’d be “Stinky”.

“The Farmer in the Dell”, in case you’ve never heard of it, is a brutal exercise in social torture disguised as a sweet little children’s game. I’ll bet some medieval people made it up to separate the popular wheat from the untouchable chaff so villagers with pools didn’t have to be nice to their neighbours. Did Mrs. Mason know this when she taught the game to her innocent little grade one students? Probably not. I loved Mrs. Mason. She smelled of L’Air du Temps and wore pearls and matching sweater sets. She was kind and beautiful. But “The Farmer in the Dell” was not one of her best ideas.

Cheryl Schaefer ended up being The Cheese so many times in grade one in Farmer in the Dell, she finally ran right out of class and sprinted the two miles to her house. When she came back the next week, she was excused from playing the game for the rest of the grade. She had a note from Principal Murphy saying so. When the class played FITD in Gym, she was allowed to go to the office and help Mrs. Clark stuff envelopes. Much later, in grade seven, she became a sprinting star winning first in the 500 yard dash at competitions all over the province. I’m pretty sure she had “The Farmer in the Dell” to thank for her success.

Here’s how the game went: Everyone stood in a circle around The Farmer - who was always Alan Hilton because he was Mrs. Mason’s pet. Then everyone sang about The Farmer being In the Dell and a few Hi Ho Dairiooohs, and after that, Farmer Alan chose a wife and she (always a girl, it was 1963) stepped inside the circle with him. If Alan chose Deedee, she picked me next. And I’d do the same for her. So neither of us had to be The Cheese all through grade one.

So, “wife” chose a “child” who chose a nurse who chose an animal; dog, cat, cow, etc. You get the idea. And this went on and on until The Rat was chosen. And the rat, being a rat, picked “The Cheese”. Then, everyone backed slowly away and sang: The Cheese Stands Alone! while the cheese kid just stood there solitary and unclaimed like an abandoned bag at a bus station.

So, in grade two, without the protection of my Very Best Friend, guess who ended up being The Cheese? Did I pull a Cheryl? No way. I just stood there being the best damn cheese I could be. Until Cindy whispered “Stinky Cheese”. And soon, others had joined in. They’d whisper it when they passed me in the hall and just before I gave my presentation on The Maple Tree for Science. Over time they shortened it to the one smelly adjective. And so I became “Stinky”.

My smelly nickname stuck all through grade two. In grade three, Cindy made up a secret alphabet to use with the Pool Party Club. They printed strange hieroglyphics on ratty scraps of paper and passed them to each other in class. Once, Eric Eckles snuck a look at one of the notes, but he didn’t understand it. And he was really good at crosswords.

Desperately, I tried to offer some juicy gossip to Cindy in hopes of getting some social protection or at the very least, a better nickname. I scribbled out a few scathing (and fictitious) factoids* about Margery Whithall on a page I ripped out of my Language exercise book. (*Her underwear was grey…She didn’t wash…Her mother had a mustache. And, I drew a picture of a pig and labelled it Margery Pighall. I am not proud of this.) Next day in Gym, I asked to go to the bathroom and secretly snuck back to the classroom to put the note on Cindy’s desk.

Language was right after Gym. When Cindy saw the new note she made a beeline for her desk. I pretended to study for the adjective test that day and waited for my note’s explosive contents to land. But when she read it, Cindy just squinted at me and hissed “Everybody knows that…Stinky”. When Mrs. Steffani turned her back to print the word “maximum” on the blackboard, Cindy wadded the note into a tight ball and threw it. It hit me so hard in the right eye, I had to go to the school nurse and I took the whole next day off.