We were woken up unexpectedly early this morning by Oliver on the phone.
Now that he is in Year Two he is allowed to have a phone card and ring us whenever he likes, unlike his first year, when for the first couple of terms his phone calls were supervised and limited to one every week.
What tends to happen with this arrangement is that for the first week or two our offspring call home all the time with varying degrees of homesickness, and then just as I am seriously starting to wonder if we should charge over to school and rescue them from their grief- stricken despair, the calls peter out, to be replaced by a prolonged and deafening silence.
By the summer term we have been reduced to ringing up the head of house and begging them to ask our child to call home, usually resulting in an email several days later that says: “What do you want now?” and occasionally includes a follow-up sentence to the effect that the child would like some more money, but which nonetheless presents a clear intimation that we are a tiresome nuisance in a fully occupied and satisfying life.
We are still at the beginning of the year, and so Oliver has called us twice now, which is rather nice, and makes up for Lucy not contacting us at all, except for an irate email complaining that she needed a new shirt for PE, because it had not been put in her games bag, and last year’s had been too small anyway, and requesting that I please dispatch a better fitting one instantly, which of course I did, and which cost me twenty four quid. ‘How lovely to hear from you, darling,’ I replied, just a little bit untruthfully.
Oliver is having a good, if still slightly homesick time. He is having flute lessons and shooting lessons and rugby lessons, and presumably maths and English lessons as well, although he didn’t mention those. He has joined the Lego Club and the Warhammer Club and the Climbing Club and at the weekend they all went off to do the Army assault course. He talked until the bell rang, when he had got to dash off, a bit tearfully: and then we made a coffee and went to sit back in bed and talk over all his news.
It is always nice to talk to them, although a bit unsettling all round. Oliver has a very happy time at school until the moment he speaks to me, at which point he suddenly thinks about home and feels sad because he is not there.
I know that he is always all right again a minute or two after he has come off the phone, because I have had photographic evidence patiently sent to me by the Headmaster’s wife after one especially tragedy-riven telephone call, when he sobbed as if his little heart would break, leaving me frozen with horror at my wickedness in sending him away from home.
Of course I called school immediately to wonder if I should immediately drive over to Yorkshire to collect him, and the Headmaster’s kindly wife listened patiently and went to investigate in order to offer comfort and reassurance to the distraught boy.
She sent me a photograph a couple of minutes later, of a boy who was unmistakeably Oliver, without a tear in sight, shrieking with laughter and playing some sort of chess-with-wrestling game with some other not at all forlorn or homesick waifs, and an email which was very understanding, but nevertheless made me feel like I was the sort of parent who failed due to making too much ridiculous fuss, rather than the sort who failed due to indifferently dispatching their child away to a tragic existence of lonely misery.
All the same, tears on the phone inevitably make me feel like David Copperfield’s stepfather, pitilessly abandoning my frail and defenceless offspring to find their own path in the wicked world. I know that this is not true, and that actually school manages to look after him considerably better than I do, but all the same the Parental Guilt Fairy never misses a decent opportunity for humour at my expense, and I sat in bed afterwards having private anxiety pangs over my coffee.
They are back for exeat in a fortnight. I suppose I had better make the most of the splendidly tidy peace and quiet.
It seems to be passing very quickly.
