School

We do not have our children at home any more.

It was the last day of Oliver’s summer. He had got to be back at school by six, which seemed as though it was plenty of time, and I spent the day printing him some new photographs out for him to take with him and packing up the last of his things. Mark went to the farm to start scrubbing off the boiler, he has built an electrolysis tank in which to dunk it but wanted to get rid of some of the soot first.

When he got home it was not at all difficult to guess that that this was what he had been doing, you may be able to tell from the picture that he had been wearing a dust mask and that the rest of him was soot colour. Oliver wanted Daddy to come with us, so I sent both of them off to shower, and in Mark’s case, shave as well.

Oliver was pretty revolting, as you know: but Mark was worse. I vacuum-pumped Oliver’s ears and scrubbed his neck and trimmed his nails, and made Mark get back in the shower again for a second attempt, because even after some Bluebell soap he still smelled sooty and looked as if he had been experimenting amateurishly with Kohl eyeliner.

In the end both of them were fairly presentable. Oliver’s uniform still fitted, to my relief, and just before we left he gave me a hug and said: “You work so hard to look after me, Mummy, thank you for getting everything ready,” which was astonishingly lovely from a child who did not want me to buy him sweets or anything, and made me feel quite gruffly sentimental.

We would have arrived back at school in good time had I not realised halfway to Kendal that I had left a bag on the kitchen table, and so we had to turn round and go back, which of course made us late, about which Mark nobly refrained from comment, which I thought was generous, I would have been very grumpy about it, and he is clearly a much better person than I am.

After that it was a horrible lunatic race along endless country lanes through Yorkshire, which made me feel sick and Oliver say: “But isn’t it against the rules to drive this fast, Daddy?” which Mark agreed that it probably was, and still didn’t mention that it was Mummy’s fault.

We made it with minutes to spare, and the place was a complete scrum of parents and boys dragging sacks of games kit and new uniforms and Lego up and down the stairs. Fortunately they were all too preoccupied with organising their own offspring to look up and notice that my husband still had faint sooty traces here and there, and that he had put on the T shirt with a hole in it whilst unsupervised, and I hadn’t had time to change at all: and Oliver arrived into his dorm to excited yells of “It’s Ibby!” because of course his first name is one of the things that he leaves at home, along with his Playstation and his pink teddy.

We had just about got him unpacked when the bell rang for supper, and it was time to say goodbye. We hugged him, and he almost cried but managed not to, and then we had to leave him to disappear into the milling crowd of boys and make our way home.

I was glad Mark was there, because of course I was sad then, because I won’t have any children under my feet and leaving the lights on and eating all the biscuits, and because it is a terrible thing to leave your small boy in the middle of a mass of other small boys, even if you know he will be perfectly happy and start his flute lessons on Friday.

I am far too British to cry, farewells to one’s children must be done with a stiff upper lip and a firm handshake.

I am on the taxi rank outside the You And Me Restaurant now, where Lucy has worked all summer, and I don’t need to look up at the windows to see if I can catch a glimpse of her any more: and I keep thinking about Oliver’s battered playing out shoes, which are lying empty on the doormat at home.

By tomorrow I will have remembered that it will be brilliant to be able to get on with things without having to keep stopping to cook pizza and wipe up spilt apple juice.

I will see them in three weeks.