Not only did last night’s diary entry mysteriously not manage to be shared properly on Facebook, but tonight’s is also going to be fairly short.
The problem with sharing it is that the wifi on the taxi rank can be unpredictably erratic, and last night it must have disappeared without my noticing: so that when I pressed ‘share’, nothing happened, which I failed to notice.
It wasn’t a very thrilling entry anyway.
Tonight’s is short because I am off to bed in the very near future. I had an early start this morning due to the necessity of presenting myself in North Yorkshire by nine o’clock, and hence I would like to catch up on some sleep.
I was in Yorkshire, obviously, to collect Oliver, because the term has vanished like a puddle in the sunshine, and it is Easter.
Collecting him is a remarkably easy experience. Somebody stands at the bottom of the school drive with a walkie-talkie and tells the staff, assembled in the hall with the boys and their piles of luggage, whose parents are arriving. Then your boy is sent out with his luggage and a helpful assistant, you chuck it all in the car except for the assistant, obviously, and drive off again. The whole thing takes less than two minutes.
This morning the headmaster’s wife was on bottom-of-the-drive duty. She is lovely, young and eager, and was hopping from foot to foot and beaming as excitedly as any of the boys. It took rather longer than usual because everybody kept stopping to smile and exchange happy remarks with her.
I don’t know how she remembers which boy belongs to which parents, it is a stunning feat of memory. I have not managed to achieve this in the four years that Oliver has been a pupil. When other parents come up to talk to me I have to search the lost recesses of my brain desperately to remember who the boy is that they are talking about. This is not helped by mummies talking about their sons by their Christian names, and Oliver only ever refers to them as ‘Smith’ or worse, by some peculiar nickname such as ‘Fothery’.
He bounced out this morning, clutching Spider-Man and dragging his games bag, grinning until his face almost split.
He told me all about it in the car.
He has had a brilliant term. Next term he is sharing a dorm with his best friends, and everything is going to be splendid.
He is a world away from the tiny eight-year-old we left there all those years ago.
He laughed about this this morning. First years, he said kindly, have got such a lot to learn, they are hardly real schoolboys at all. They don’t know anything about anything.
He wasn’t really able to articulate the changes he felt had happened since he had started, but he was quite sure that they had all been good ones, and actually so was I. He is brimming with self-assured confidence, an ease in his own skin and in the world, it was such a lovely thing to see.
It was not even dented when we got home and found an email from the Director of Studies explaining that he was expected to do two hours’ work every day of the holidays. The Common Entrance Examination is fast turning from a distant spectre into a present ogre, and the pressure is beginning to build.
“That’s all right,” he said philosophically, “I want to do well.”
Then, after a moment’s considered reflection, he added:
“I might start tomorrow, though.”
