life of a boarder

Phoebe Imberger

There has always been this preconception of what an all girl school boarding house is like, and if I’m being honest when I became a boarder at PLC Armidale I thought the exact same thing. I expected that I would have to live in my school uniform, have horrible staff watching over me and have to live in close proximity with girls who had questionable habits. I was seriously mistaken. I have lived with some of these girls for three years now and some of my most memorable experiences that I can recall happened with those girls or in the walls of the boarding house.

It’s a well known fact that in the 70’s people would have pet rocks that they would love and take with them everywhere. Well, in the boarding house we aren’t allowed any animals larger than a fish so we had to compromise. We were going for a walk around the back of the school when we stumbled across a pumpkin plant with one tiny little baby pumpkin growing on it. We immediately knew that we wanted to raise it as our child and without hesitation named it ‘Bubba Faquim’ (the last name was a combination of all of our last initials). We drew a little face on it, dressed it in cloth and took it everywhere with us. When it came to lights out we made a little schedule to decide whose bed Bubba would sleep in that night, one of the girls in our dorm however, lost the privilege of sleeping with Bubba. She wanted to pierce its ears! What makes this even more psychotic is that since Bubba didn’t have ears she wanted to make some and then pierce them. It was a scary moment for all of Bubba’s parents and despite our very firm ‘no’ at the beginning after about a week we grew bored with caring for a rotting pumpkin and allowed her to give Bubba a makeover. Not long after Bubba was thrown into the bin as it was really stinking the place up, but it was truly a special moment. I have high hopes for these girls to be mothers in the future.

Having lived with the same people for a few years you start to get comfortable around them. However, when I think of getting closer to people I never expected that it would include things like creating a voodoo dreamcatcher out of our own hair and mandarin skins, dragging a table for over 400m down a super steep slope in the pouring down rain to create a den that looks so horrible that we never visit, and eating an entire chocolate mud cake on the floor at 3 oclock in the morning.

These girls have become my family and I know it sounds like the biggest and most overheard cliche but I don’t know who I would be or how I would have turned out if it wasn’t for them. They are my personal hypeup crew when I get a new outfit or am just feeling really horrible about myself, they are my personal bodyguards when a guy does me wrong and with a mixture of tough love and clinginess I have made some of the best and strongest relationships in my life.