Lucy has gone.
It is very difficult to have children who have been at boarding school for some time.
When they are eleven you are terribly anxious about the whole thing. You sew in labels and hanging loops, pack and check and re-pack, read clothing lists and tick things off and worry. A family with children in boarding school is instantly recognisable because every pillowcase has their name on it, every towel has a loop sewn in it, and all of the poppers on everything are squished flat because of the school laundry system.
Also they have got no money.
When they are seventeen you get up on the day that they leave and think a swear word.
After that you run about frantically saying things like: “But you must have some socks somewhere.”
When you have shoved the socks in the washing machine you dash out to the Co-op for supplies of tuck and coffee. Then you order things on Amazon and arrange for them to be delivered to school.
At seventeen Lucy does a lot of her own packing. At half past two I realised that she was still in her pyjamas watching YouTube on her computer. She had her earplugs in and her feet on the desk and a cup of coffee in her hand.
I readjusted my thought process and went downstairs for a cup of tea.
In the end we all came downstairs and had a family cup of tea together. When we discussed it we decided that Lucy probably had everything that she needed and I remembered that I had already stuffed several pairs of socks into the trunk when I tidied the loft last week.
It was lovely to be together. The children have got a lot of the same exeat weekends this term, so we won’t have to wait very long until the next time, and after some discussion we thought that we would like to go to Blackpool at half term. This is because Oliver is going on a skiing holiday at Easter and explained that he would like to practice his ice skating, which will be a part of the trip.
We all like ice skating, and so Blackpool it will have to be. Lucy has got enough ice skating qualifications to go to the closed sessions at the rink which are not open to muppets. The rest of us have not, so we will have to manage with whatever is available, she can teach Oliver to skate properly. When he was little he was always so cross about having to go and skate because Lucy liked it, that he refused point blank to learn anything, and used to skate straight to the side of the rink and scowl. We all took the opportunity today to say that we had told him so.
After a while I realised that school restarted earlier than I had thought, and that in fact she had got to be back by six, not eight o’clock. We were setting off, resigned to being late, when a shiny car shot around the corner, and it was the lodger and her friend Irish Mike, who had come rushing up to say goodbye to her.
It was really splendid to see them, we haven’t had chance to catch up with Irish Mike since Christmas. He told us about his new Nerf gun, and we told him about Mark’s activities with his friend Ted, and we laughed and hugged each other in the road, and set off for school having had such a lovely time together that I wondered fleetingly if I was about to be run over by a truck on the way, but I wasn’t.
Lucy said that I was not to worry because she would do her prep when she got back to school, and when we got there we found that she had been allocated quite the nicest dormitory in the school.
She has got a room to herself, with her own washstand and wardrobe and cupboards and shelves and a pretty chest of drawers. Nobody minded about her socks, and there were lots of other parents who were considerably later than we were. This was because it is the sixth form. All the juniors had been deposited on time by parents who have not yet stopped worrying about it.
We discovered that we had remembered everything except all of her shoes, so I agreed to post them tomorrow.
We will miss her.
