I got up twice this morning.
The first time was when Number One Daughter called for a chat at about half past nine. I recall having a lovely chat and going back to bed feeling pleased and warm with the world: then the second time maybe doesn’t count as it wasn’t morning by then, it was almost one o’clock, and time to start organising life, because Lucy had got to be at school for five o’clock, ready for the coach to depart, we were warned, on the dot of six.
The time flew past. By the time we had had coffee and walked the dogs and Oliver and Harry had turned up for their second breakfast, or possibly first lunch, depending on your point of view, it was time for Lucy and I to start setting off.
There was the usual disorganised last minute flurry of things we had forgotten to do. We had given her some Euros but forgotten to put them in an envelope with her name on, and all of yesterday’s emergency washing was still on the drying rack, and then there was a muddle of phone chargers and toothbrushes and in the end her suitcase was absolutely enormous and thumped down the stairs like an approaching diplodocus.
Mark heaved it in to the boot of the car, and everybody hugged Lucy, and she wished she wasn’t going and we wished we were all going with her, and she looked absolutely beautiful and fresh in a lovely mint coloured jacket and cream shoes with her hair swept back on to the top of her head, and Mark grumbled sadly about her not being a little girl any more, which pleased her, and Oliver looked for a minute as though he might cry, and the dogs got in the car and wouldn’t get out again: and then everything was done and sorted out and we were off.
It was a lovely sunny afternoon for the drive. I made her write down our phone numbers in case she needed to call us and had lost her phone, and we agreed that in the event of a cataclysmic earthquake, zombie apocalypse or a nuclear war or other similar disaster requiring heroes to run the wrong way through terrified crowds to rescue little girls, she would make her way to the Eiffel Tower and we would come and find her there. Then we talked for a while about what being dead might be like, and concluded that it was probably very much like the time before we were born, and just at that point everything went horribly wrong.
The road in front of us filled with traffic cones, and people in high visibility jackets waving at us, and all the traffic was diverted somewhere else.
Suddenly instead of bowling along happily in the sunshine, making good time to get to school for five o’clock and feeling pleased with the nicely-functioning world in which we were happily not dead, we were sitting stickily in boiling traffic fumes on some unknown rural B road, in an endless line of unmoving cars and lorries that had been turned off the A66 and was now pointing completely in the wrong direction, and not a diversion sign in sight.
This was the cue to panic horribly. We phoned school and told them we would be late, and we phoned Mark, and we phoned Mark, and we phoned Mark, but he had left his phone on charge in the kitchen and absent mindedly gone out to work.
We sat there, trapped in crawling traffic, directionless, late and worried.
It was almost an hour before Mark remembered his phone and popped home to pick it up.
I shrieked at him in alarm, and he looked on the computer and a map and slowly talked us out of the traffic jam and down lots of little single-track back roads that meandered over tiny stone bridges across rivers, and through little woodlands and past stately homes, at least one of which I recognised as belonging to one of Oliver’s classmates, and eventually wound back to Scotch Corner.
I hurtled down the M1 at ninety five miles an hour whilst Lucy talked reassuringly on the phone to the impatient teacher waiting with the coach at school. Of course he promised not to go without her, but we knew that every punctual child was sitting patiently waiting for us to arrive, and guilt throbbed in my temples like a letter from the bailiffs.
In the end we screeched up the drive at one minute to six, and flung her suitcase on to the coach and hugged each other in relief.
She sat at the back with the other rascals, and I jumped up and down and waved until she rolled her eyes and drew the curtain across the window: and the coach chugged off solidly down the drive and I could collapse against the side of the taxi.
It took two headache tablets and splashing my face with water in the school lavatories before I pulled myself together enough to set off for home.
But it is done, and she is on her way.
As long as we don’t have a zombie apocalypse everything will be absolutely fine.
PS. The enormous red bag visible underneath the cardboard box in the hold of the coach is hers. She is the just-visible mint-coloured figure in the back window.
