We had a bit of a tuck misfortune whilst taking Oliver back to school. He was busy consuming his final Rolos before returning to the barren desert of a balanced diet, when he dropped one without noticing.
When we arrived at school we discovered that he had sat on it.
He was going back to school. Of course it was not going to be a problem. We changed his trousers, and I handed the sticky pair to Matron, explaining what had happened.
This is one of my favourite bits of boarding school. Matron whisked the trousers away and told Oliver that he should go downstairs because his dinner would be ready in two ticks.
The glorious scent of frying bacon was wafting up the stairs.
My responsibilities are over for another fortnight.
I have spent the day packing and counting underpants and matching socks and gloves, and ordering things on Amazon to be delivered to school. I could have had them sent here last week, but Oliver likes getting parcels at school, and so we ordered some boots and some books, and of course when he gets to school he will have his backlog of Beano comics to catch up.
We get these delivered to school every week for him, so that he knows we still love him and haven’t forgotten about him. It is a direct debit so it doesn’t matter even if I have forgotten about him. When he comes home he brings them all with him and we take them to the dentist or the doctor to cheer up people with toothache or earache.
Oliver spent the day in bed watching YouTube videos and procrastinating about the shower.
In the end I levered him out of bed and he scrubbed himself back to a pinkish colour. He poked his ears clean of horrible boy-sticky and trimmed his nails to a tidy length that would not upset Matron. I do not do any of these things for him any more, because he is a senior boy now.
Matron looked him up and down and pronounced that he had grown, which I knew, because of his trousers having become too short over the holidays. He has only had them since September and I have had to replace them all, none of them even had a hole in.
School was crowded with mummies and tweed-jacketed boys, struggling up and down the stairs with huge bags. Oliver’s dormitory is on the top floor. He is not Dorm Captain this year because he is only a fourth former, and they are sharing with the fifth form, so obviously it has got to be one of them. All the same the top floor is a place reserved only for the virtuous and most grown-up, because of it being furthest away from Matron.
We were fortunate enough to attract the attention of a gapper, which is the name school gives to a group of young men who come in to school to hover about and give extra rugby coaching and decide whether or not they would like to become teachers when they grow up.
The gapper carried the bag up all three flights of stairs for us, for which I was profoundly grateful. Oliver’s bed was ready made up with his unicorn duvet cover, and we added Spider-man to the pillow. We laid everything carefully in the places where Matron says they must all go, and then it was time to say goodbye.
My heart did not bleed very much, because of the bacon smell and the number of little boys yelling Hey Ibby at him. I issued all the usual maternal instructions about Trying Hard and Keeping Warm, not that it was cold, school has ace central heating, you don’t even need a jersey. We hugged each other as hard as we could under the great archway, and he was gone.
I do not have any children at home. I will not need to think about fish fingers again for ages. The washing machine can be left alone for days at a time, and I will have to write my own diary even if I have been drinking.
I shall miss them.
The picture is Windermere in its state of January restoration.
