I have taken Lucy back to school.
We had a Mummy And Daughter Chat in the car on the way back.
This is one of the nice things about taking children back to school as they are a captive audience and can neither slope off back to their bedrooms when I am in full flow, nor enlist the support of their siblings to ridicule my sensible maternal advice.
I took advantage of her proximity to ask kindly How She Was Feeling.
It turned out that she was having a little crisis because of not having read a single word of the hundredweight of books she had brought home over the holidays in order to facilitate her revision for the approaching Year Four exams.
I said reassuringly that I would still love her even if she turned out to be as thick as a plank, but she said that was no help as my loving her was not ever likely to be a lucrative arrangement since I hadn’t listened at school either.
I suggested that if the worst came to the worst we could always find her a job in a taxi. This has managed to support us, mostly, and so she could do quite all right as well, especially if she manages to avoid having any children.
She disagreed rather emphatically, and with some scorn, despite the fact that she is not planning to have any children under any circumstances, after Ritalin Boy’s recent visit, which I think would be a sensible idea. This is because she herself was a truly dreadful baby, of the loud and sleepless sort, and there is always the awful possibility that it might turn out to be genetic.
I said that the exams would probably be all right, and that none of her teachers had really meant it when they said that she should do at least an hour of revision every day, it was just one of those things that teachers say without thinking about it, like I Suppose You Think You’re Funny, Boy.
I pointed out that I hadn’t ever done a daily hour of revision during school holidays and probably nobody else in the world ever had either, but since several of her class are Chinese girls with tiger mothers I might have been wrong. Also she was quite adamant that she had no wish to end up like me as I am always broke with bad taste, and by the way, if I was determined to go to Appleby Fair this week would I make sure that anything that I bought there got left to somebody other than her when I died.
It is of course an awful guilt-making thing to tell people to do, especially when it is not real exams, but just practice school ones, The sun has been shining, and it is unlikely that anybody is going to sit in their bedroom reading about equations, especially when they work at nights in a Chinese restaurant in order to have some pocket money during the term. I am not in the least surprised that she didn’t get her act together. All the same, I had to acknowledge that she could probably have managed to squeeze in the occasional hour of revision here and there had she felt like it, but being a person who has never have felt like it herself I was in no position to comment.
Lucy certainly thought so, and after a while she said that my maternal advice was rubbish and stuck her earphones back in, so I put my Sherman Brothers CD on the stereo and turned it up so that I could sing.
I was halfway through There’s A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow when we went past the gypsy camp at the side of the road, so I turned it off to get Lucy to take some pictures of them with their gorgeous bow top caravans, and she rolled her eyes and said it was like being driven by a four year old.
I am so glad not to be a teenager any more, it is awful to have such a short list of things that you are allowed to like. It is lovely to be fifty and able to like everything.
I dropped her off at school and promised reassuringly that I would come and get her if she was chucked out for being an inadequate reviser, and then put my CD back on and sang all the way home.
Poor Lucy. I hope it all goes all right.
We miss her dreadfully.
