Sweet Revenge: 200 Delicious Ways to Get Your Own Back

by Belinda

  Several children at a famous public school took a cardboard box and cut out the bottom. They then placed it in the middle of the corridor, filled it with twenty mice and taped the top shut knowing that the headmistress was coming along at any minute. The chaos was indescribable when she picked up the box.

  The Australian nanny made a good pretence of getting on well with the family. She always had a smile on her face and was friendly and cooperative. Both parents were lawyers and worked hard and while they were at their respective offices she enjoyed sole charge of the children. During the day, when they were at school, the nanny had been asked to clear out all the children's outgrown clothes and all the baby equipment and take them to the second-hand shop, which she sweetly did - the couple had made it clear that they were definitely having no more children.

  Came a time when the unappreciative couple were going away to a remote Caribbean island, leaving the exhausted nanny and children for two weeks. The couple wanted to crash out in the sun and 'get to know each other again' on a second honeymoon.

  As the resentful nanny waved them goodbye she smiled, remembering how she had quietly removed mum's contraceptive pills from her spongebag and hidden them in the bathroom.

  'When I was a very young girl at boarding school in Kenya, as in most schools, we had a bully. She was a girl who was older than the rest of us seven-year-olds and took advantage of her position as the oldest in the dormitory. Most of us learned to keep one step ahead of her although none of us escaped the bullying and the blackmail completely.

  'One term, a new girl joined the school and she was the perfect target: small in size, very shy, extremely insecure and desperately homesick. She became the main focus of our bully. Needless to say she was totally unable to cope and it was obvious to everyone that if something wasn't done, she would crack. Telling teachers and matrons about this sort of thing never occurred to us, it just wasn't done, so two friends and I planned a campaign.

  'All dormitories had their rules set down by matron and if these were broken badly enough the offender was removed to another dormitory. Rule one: all shoes had to be cleaned and put at the end of our beds each morning for inspection; then, after dressing, we were marched to breakfast. In no circumstances must anyone be late for meals. Therefore, my friends and I systematically hid vital bits of uniform and shoes so our bully was regularly late for breakfast, frequently improperly dressed! (Rule two: all girls must wear full uniform at all times other than recreation times.)

  Rule three: all homework must be presented on time each morning. Miss X suddenly had trouble locating the homework she had done the previous evening and, therefore, was unable to present it in class - Big Trouble!!

  There were several other "magic moments" when we got the better of her. While all this was going on, it distracted her attention and our little friend had time to settle in and adjust to boarding school. To our delight, Miss X was moved to another dormitory the next term where she was to become the subject of some "shall we say, gentle persuasion"!'

  - with thanks to Diane Keen, actress.

  A couple of decades ago a pupil at Westminster School had had enough of a rather unpleasant bully - a monitor who prided himself on the tidiness and immaculate state of his study. He would strut around ticking off those whose studies were in a mess and set all manner of unsavoury jobs as punishment. Peter decided to get his own back.

  He asked matron for some bread to feed the birds in St James' Park. Matron handed the bread over with an indulgent smile: 'How sweet,' she thought. Peter took his duffle bag and sat on a park bench. The OAPs on either side were evidently as charmed as Matron by this selfless act and he received many smiles of encouragement. The pigeons came closer and closer, strutting and cooing as they fluttered over the bread, and finally actually settled on Peter's arms and hands. Then came the difficult part: catching one without being seen and with minimum noise and loss of feathers. The first was no problem, the second a little more of a struggle.

  Back to school he went, straight to the monitor's study where all windows were carefully closed. Bread was scattered liberally, the birds released and the door closed. The devastation after a couple of hours was a sight to behold.

  - with apologies to the RSPB.

  A young lad built up quite a resentment towards a housemaster at school who, he believed, picked on him at every opportunity. The housemaster was due to go away for a few days and asked the boy to feed his dog during his absence to which the boy kindly agreed.

  The boy looked after the dog well and, on the night before the master was due back, gave him some chocolate as an extra-special treat. Only it wasn't ordinary chocolate. It was Ex-lax...

  An Englishman's Home...

  '…if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?'

  William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

  An Englishman's Home...

  Fiorella is a beautiful literary agent who was going out with a very promiscuous and big headed racing driver. She could see that the writing was on the wall and, believing that you should never go out without taking a bow, decided to leave him a souvenir of their time together. She spent a whole afternoon cutting up bits of paper with the words 'I love you' written on each one. She put them all over the apartment: in his pockets, in the salt and pepper mills, the bag of flour, in pillow and cushion covers, between the pages of books - there was no end to her creativity.

  He was still finding them a year later; he actually phoned her to tell her she had just blown it for him yet again when his current girlfriend found one of her billets-doux.

  A couple of plumbers got their own back on the obnoxious home-owners for whom they were working. They plumbed the radiators into the hot-water system, rather than the heating system, which meant the rads were permanently hot... perfectly acceptable until the summer came.

  A man returned home from work and was somewhat surprised to find that his house was not quite the colour it had been when he left that morning. He had recently dropped his girlfriend and returned to his former love - who happened to be his ex's sister. The jilted sibling had caused £3,149-worth of damage by painting the carpets, furniture and the walls in blue gloss paint; she wrote: 'You will wish you had never messed with me' on the walls; and glued his CD's to their boxes.

  The magistrate said that although there had been considerable provocation, they could not send out the message that people could go round doing that sort of thing every time they fell out with their boyfriend. She was bound over to keep the peace for a year and ordered to pay £45 costs.

  Althea Barclay was only 18 when she exacted her revenge on Rory Annesley, although she cannot remember what he had done to deserve it.

  She let herself into his flat when she knew he was going away for a few days. She turned up the heating, dampened the carpets and sprinkled mustard and cress seeds throughout the flat. A verdant, four-inch deep living carpet greeted his return. Despite this, Althea later became Mrs Rory Annesley.

  The divorce was messy and unpleasant and he deeply resented the fact that she stood to gain so much of the empire that he himself had built from scratch long before she had come on the scene. The spoils were being divided and it seemed that there was no end to her demands.

  When his lawyer said that the furniture had to be divided in half, something snapped. He had each and every piece of beautiful furniture - French cabinets,

  mahogany tables, sofas and armchairs - cut in half down the middle. He even made two matching heaps of sawdust.

  In Pillow Talk, a 1959 film starring Rock Hudson as playboy Brad Allen and Doris Day as interior designer Jan Morrow, Jan finds out that Brad has been playing with her affections. Jan gets him out of his apartment for a few days and has the entire place redecorated... as a bordello.

  A certain aristocrat grew increasingly irritated by the hordes of people who, each summer, regarded his garden as a public picnic area. They thought nothing of spreading their blankets and setting up camp right outside his window and, when th
ey had finished, leaving assorted bottles, bags and rubbish scattered all over the lawn.

  One party had been particularly obnoxious. As they left, he hastily grabbed a number of things from the larder and threw them in a basket, leapt into his car and followed the picnickers home. On arrival, he pitched camp in their front garden, spread out his rug and proceeded to eat a hearty supper right there in front of their house.

  A titled lady living in London found, to her horror, that her boyfriend of six years had secretly taken her great friend away for a dirty weekend. She spent the whole of Sunday sitting outside his front door with a canister of helium. One by one she inflated 1,000 black balloons through his letter box.

  When he returned to his home that night, not only did

  he have an enormous amount of difficulty opening his door, but could not believe his eyes when confronted with 1,000 black balloons crammed into his rather small mews house.

  Looking Good?

  'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.'

  Gospel according to St Matthew 5:38

  Looking Good?

  Rumour has it that there was more to the story than met the eye when President Clinton had his infamous $200 haircut on board Air Force One. During this time the plane sat on the tarmac and the airport was closed for two hours.

  Apparently, Hillary always used the services of Christophe of Beverly Hills who had felt horribly snubbed when she had gone to his New York rival for her hairdo for the inaugural celebrations. To get his own back Christophe quite deliberately took ages coiffing the Presidential hair in order to make headlines worldwide and become a household name in the States. He achieved his objective.

  Although they had already separated a wife got the full satisfaction of seeing her husband humiliated. While they were still (just) under the same roof, she took his morning suit to some machine embroiderers who emblazoned a magnificent message on his back. He was tipped off at the wedding reception but, too late! Everyone had seen it in church - he had been in the second row. Indeed one man slapped him on the shoulder and asked genially: 'How are you, you little prick?' The message read: '1988 President, Tiny Dicks Club.'

  Iain Napier was the perfect house guest but for one problem. The house was a modest affair with just one bathroom for both hosts and guests to share and Iain would insist on using the one and only tooth mug for his false teeth. Everything else was just so perfect in Kenya that everyone tried to overlook it and, after the generator had been switched off in the evening and life reverted to candlelight, it was all so romantic that anything could be forgiven.

  The hostess, however, wanted to make a point about the teeth to encourage him to find an alternative site another time. On his final night she made sure that he received their finest hospitality which included copious amounts of alcohol. When he was in bed and well and truly comatose she tiptoed into the bathroom and removed the teeth. Once back in her room she dried them off, took out her bright red nail polish and painted the two front teeth bright red. Once dry she returned them to the contentious mug.

  He felt fairly ill in the morning and paid less attention than he should to matters of packing and toilet. He did notice the funny looks he received on the four-hour journey to Nairobi, at check-in and on the aeroplane but it was some time later when he actually went to the loo and caught sight of himself in the mirror.

  Two old friends had a major falling out which was sad since they both lived and worked near each other. One had an office in Regent Street, the other ran a major gentleman's clothing store nearby.

  Walking back to the office after a good lunch in a fish restaurant one day the businessman developed a severe stomach upset which became more and more critical by the second. Accidents will happen - and did. He rushed, tight-buttocked, into his friend's store to buy a clean pair

  of trousers. He was served by the owner himself, who was barely able to disguise his glee at his friend's discomfort and took his time as he wrapped the goods and handed over the carrier bag.

  Grabbing the bag our friend limped towards a taxi and ordered it to take him to Liverpool Street Station where he would catch his train home and recover his health in peace. Hardly daring to breathe, he prayed the train would get going quickly. Once it was on the move, he raced to the lavatory. As the train bore him westwards he ripped off his soiled trousers and threw them out of the window. Opening the bag he withdrew his new purchase, only to find that his friend had wrapped him a nice, blue pullover.

  A well-known actress understandably asked to remain nameless when relating the revenge she wrought on her lover who had deceived her. Before she walked out she left behind a little souvenir. She tipped black dye in the bottom of his washing machine. His next load was whites only - at least they were before the wash.

  PamellaBordes, spurned lover of ex-Sunday Times newspaper editor Andrew Neil, is probably the most famous suit slasher - it was widely reported that she exacted her revenge by cutting the crotch out of each and every one of them.

  A dollop of fake tan in a woman's moisturiser can wreak havoc, as discovered by Catherine Small. As the morning progressed people in her office looked at her more and more strangely. It was only when she went to the loo and saw her streaky orange-brown face that she identified

  the strange smell that had dogged her all day. Her boyfriend had been increasingly irritated by how much time she spent in front of the mirror and had decided to strike back.

  The woman who drenched her erring husband's suits in very nasty cheap perfume had the satisfaction of knowing that they still reeked even after four dry-cleanings... and he had to wear one of them to work while the others were being cleaned.

  Wimmin's Revenge. There were red shoulders and red faces last May during a scorching London heatwave. On a building site at the corner of Wardour Street and Old Compton Street (aka 'Queer Street'), passing women were greatly amused to see a group of heavily pierced and peroxided young men looking up at the bare-chested builders and in a chorus of cat calls and wolf whistles crying out: 'Hello Boys!' and 'Mmmm, nice buns!'

  Perfection can sometimes bring out the absolute worst in people. There was a super-tidy, super-clean lady whose obsessive behaviour inspired her best friend to new heights of school-foolish antics.

  Everything in the super-lady's house was immaculate. White was the predominant colour: on sofas, chairs and walls. Everything was arranged just so. Her clothes were perfect, the slightest crease precipitating a change of garment; her hair was always beautifully groomed; she was exactly on time; she never ate or drank too much and bags under the eyes were something she only ever read

  about. She was the perfect hostess and dust on the bookshelves just didn't exist in her world. All of this and more drove her friend to distraction so she decided to take action, to rub some of the sheen off the glossy reputation.

  Miss Wonderful was having a dinner party (perfection of course) for twenty people when her friend struck. As is often the way, she allowed the ladies to use her bathroom and so, quite soon after her arrival, her best friend needed to 'go'. When she got to the bathroom she withdrew a small pot of Marmite from her bag, found a pair of Miss Wonderful's knickers in the laundry basket and proceeded to spread the Marmite liberally. She left the horrendous looking result hanging half out of the laundry basket before returning to the party. During the course of the evening most of the female guests needed to 'freshen up'. What can they have thought?

  A woman well known in the gossip columns became increasingly fed up with her husband. While he was asleep in a drunken stupor she covered him in hair remover. He got up the next morning, had a shower, and all his hair fell off.

  - with thanks to Daily Express diarist Ross Benson.

  A new bride was upset when her husband was asked to go shooting in Wales and she was not included in the invitation. His schedule that day was horrific so he asked her if she would pack for him and he would pick up the bag after work and head off west.

  On his arrival he was shown to his room
and, to his horror, found that the bag contained not shooting gear but white trousers, tennis shoes, a life jacket, thigh-high waders, a Panama hat and his morning suit.

  An aristocratic female carefully loosened all the stitching in her husband's suits and shirts. By the time he reached the office he was looking dishevelled. Mid morning, during a meeting, a seam popped lazily open. By lunchtime he was a complete laughing stock and had to go home and change - only to find that she had changed the locks.

  Cash Crises