I can’t imagine a nicer day for a picnic.
It has been hot, a baking, dry, desert sort of heat, that leaves everything too hot to touch and the ground burning to bare feet. Corn is ripe, and everybody is haymaking. Bright poppies are clustered at the edge of all the fields, and a thick dust of grass seed and pollen is hanging in the air.
We worked late last night, and did not wake up easily this morning. It took a lot of coffee before we even started to feel excited about the day ahead, maybe not really until we were safely in the camper van and ploughing our way through the shimmering haze on the fell roads.
Number Two Daughter and Mrs. Number Two Daughter followed us in their car, because they were going to go home after the picnic, and we had got to go on to York to take Lucy to school.
When we reached Oliver’s school there were parents already on the green lawn in front of the Headmaster’s house, picnic lunches spread in the shade under the great oak trees. We had hardly started to unload when Oliver and his friend, Almost Head Boy, popped up, hopping from foot to foot with excitement, dying to show us the picnic space they had chosen and saved for us.
I had cooked things in the oven on the way over. You are not supposed to do this in case you inadvertently explode on the motorway, but fortunately we didn’t, and the van smelled wonderfully of garlic spiced chicken, hot and ready to eat. I put the pizzas in the hot oven to warm whilst we unloaded, and by the time we had spread strawberries and cherries and salads on the picnic blanket, everything was cooked.
The guns were banging away excitingly, and Mark and Almost Head Boy’s father went to watch and to weigh up the competition. Almost Head Boy and his father had brought their own guns, because they are actually middle class, and do the huntin’ and fishin’ things as well.
Number Two Daughter and Mrs. Number Two Daughter had organised the picnic blankets nicely by the time I had finished remembering to bring things from the camper van, and it turned out that we had brought plenty, and managed a reasonable compromise between things that boys would eat, like biscuits and crisps, and things that grown-ups would eat, like Prosecco, which you don’t technically eat, but it balanced the sentence better.
Mark and Almost Head Boy’s father did not want to drink too much because of not wishing to shoot their feet off by accident, and after a minute or two we were joined by Son Of Oligarch, whose mother had not yet arrived, and who was feeling in need of picnic.
I had not expected Son Of Oligarch to be competing, because of his father being in Russia, but as it turned out he had persuaded his older brother, who is at university here, to come and shoot alongside him. This turned out to be rather handy, when they got there a few minutes later, because of the older brother exchanging Facebook details with Lucy and promising to offer expert advice about universities. Lucy is feeling a bit vague about this at the moment, and so it was rather encouraging to hear some promising stories from the horse’s mouth.
In the end we were a massive picnic, in the sunshine underneath the ancient trees, which was lovely. Boys and fathers buzzed about everywhere, and the guns bashed away in the background.
Son of Oligarch shot first, and then Almost Head Boy and his father, and then it was Mark and Oliver’s turn. We watched, loyally, although I didn’t have my glasses on and so couldn’t really see what was going on, although once I heard the gun chap tell Oliver that he had had a jolly good shot. I tried to see from their walk back up the hill whether they had done well or not, but couldn’t, and it turned out that they had come out with a very respectable score of twenty seven hits out of fifty clays. Son of Oligarch and his brother managed twenty five, and Almost Head Boy and his father got twenty seven, the same as us.
I can’t pretend that this wasn’t a relief, how terrible if they had not shot anything.
Three father and son teams seemed to be sharing the winning place when we left, with forty one hits each, which was amazing, but Mark said that they were families who practice on their estates all the time, and who were competing hotly against one another.
The clay pigeon shoot man said that Aysgarth school was always his favourite day of the year, because of everybody enjoying it so much and all of the boys being polite and courteous.
We talked to one or two other parents as well, and we all shared the bitter-sweet agony of it being the very last year coming up. After this when we do things it will be for the last time, last carol service, last cricket season, last speech day. We are all part of school, and it has come to form our rhythms, and it has flown past. It can hardly, we said, be four whole years since we were all standing anxiously on that very lawn clutching glasses of Pimms and trying not to mind that we were giving our tiny boys to somebody else to bring up.
We did it, though, and the school has done the most magnificent job, far better than I could have dreamed. It is going to be very hard when it all comes to an end and the Aysgarth fledgelings flap off to the terrifying world of public school.
Oliver and Almost Head Boy and Son of Oligarch were pleased and proud of their shooting, and made polite conversation, and Oliver showed Number Two Daughter and Mrs Number Two Daughter around the school, and then all three boys explained, courteously, that they had got other things to do, and that it had been nice to see us but they were going to go.
This was, we remembered later, because of a waterslide and a barbecue that the headmaster had got going on the other side of the school, away from the parents, where the boys could charge about yelling in their swimming trunks, and wrestle one another to the ground, and see who was the bravest about the cold water. Some things are best done away from mummies.
The picture shows our picnic. Son Of Oligarch is the one pretending to have been shot in the foreground, and Oliver is the chap next to him in the blue hat.
It has been a brilliant day.
