Lucy has gone, and I am sad in that tight-throat way that you are when your children go away.
She is on the last dreadful countdown to the exams. Leaving her at school was both awful and a relief, she is in the best place to learn and work and be made ready for it all: but she is not ambling about the house in her pyjamas, eating all the olives and being followed adoringly by the dogs.
She was absorbed instantly into the back-to-school culture, welcomed with squeaks of excitement at her newly-short hair and wrapped in teenage hugs. She will be easy to find at school now. Nobody else – nobody else at all – has short hair. The difficulty of identifying our own Lucy amongst hundreds of identically uniformed pony-tailed blonde Lucys is over. Ours is the one with short hair.
You fuss far less when you are the parent of a fifth former than you do when your child is eleven. I had got her bags mostly packed except for the unsolved mystery of no longer possessing any shirts. When she was eleven this would have been a source of great trouble, but now that she is sixteen it seemed perfectly acceptable that she could arrive at school and go for a scavenge around the laundry to see what she could acquire.
We dragged ourselves out of bed early and hauled her luggage down from the loft. Mark cleaned her shoes and Lucy and I went to the Co-op for tuck box refills: and then suddenly, finally, the holiday was over.
I am astoundingly fortunate in having the only children in the world who never, ever argue. I don’t believe Lucy and Oliver have had a single squabble in their whole lives. Mark and Oliver hugged Lucy for a last time, and then we had to leave them.
We didn’t go straight to school. Instead we went to the pub just a little way away from it where I had a small but restorative glass of wine and we met up with Nan and Grandad for lunch.
We occupied the whole of two enormous courses and coffee telling them stories of our holiday in France. This must have been fairly dull, because they were mostly centred around how much we had enjoyed the good dinners and the comfortable beds.
Nan and Grandad are brilliant company because they laugh at our jokes, tell plenty of their own, and share our pleasure in eating too much. Lunch with them is a happiness to set against the approaching farewell. By the time we parted the worst of the back-to-school sting had gone, and we said our goodbyes quite cheerfully.
I drove back into the setting sun. When I finally arrived at home it was starting to get late. Mark stopped working and we had a glass of wine.
He and Oliver had occupied their unsupervised day making bombs out of Coca-cola and peppermints. Oliver had discovered on YouTube that if you shove peppermints into a bottle of coke and then seal the lid and throw it at something, it explodes and sets off like a rocket.
Mark was intrigued by this and suggested that if Oliver were to finish a couple more pages of maths homework they could go to the park and try it afterwards.
They filmed this.
The project was almost completely unsuccessful, except for one time when they managed a small explosion and were so excited they forgot to film it. In consequence there is a great deal of footage of unexploded Coke, followed by a bang and yelling, accompanied by pictures of grass.
They both seemed to have become very sticky indeed in the process.
I think it must be a boy thing.
The picture is the view from Lucy’s boarding house.
She will be fine.
