He is gone, and we are back home.
We have not been here very long. It is almost four in the morning and we have been home for about twenty minutes. We might have liked to look at Scotland for a while, but Mark has got to go and install rural broadband in the morning, and so we have come home.
I did not mean to cry, but I did.
Obviously I did not cry when we were still with Oliver. That would have been sad and embarrassing and spoiled our last minutes together. I cried afterwards, to myself, on the way home, on and off all the way, whenever I thought of his brave little face.
I gave him all of the good advice that I could, until Mark said that his ears were melting, and that he already knew everything important that he needed to know. Also we told him that if there was a zombie apocalypse he was to stay where he was and we would come and find him. I don’t think there will really be a zombie apocalypse but it is best to have a plan ready just in case.
It is such a long way.
I expect there are wildlings and White Walkers just like in A Game Of Thrones.
He is so small.
He was the smallest boy in Duffus.
I told Lucy about this on the phone later, and she said that this was no surprise, and she was the smallest policewoman in Northamptonshire university, it was because I feed them on such dreadful rubbish.
She is at home by herself tonight, she has had Pot Noodle and red wine for dinner.
We had some lunch at Gordonstoun, it was salad and wraps and chicken in lemon sauce, and Oliver had spiced beef. Perhaps he will grow a bit whilst he is there.
Duffus House is almost at the very furthest end of the campus, he will need his bicycle.
There was nobody about this morning when we arrived, and eventually we found Matron, who was supervising some men putting a bed together.
Except she was not a real Matron. She was young, and chirpy, and friendly.
She did not in the least look like she might do Nit Checks and Clean Fingernail Checks and Ear Inspections. She beamed smiles and laughed sometimes.
We shook hands with her and she just smiled in a gentle welcoming sort of way, and took us to see Oliver’s dormitory. She did not at all look Oliver up and down and tell us that he needed to be fatter.
I know that this is not alarming, because Oliver can check his own fingernails and clean his own ears. He is grown up and at public school now.
It was a bit surprising all the same.
His new dormitory is very nice.
It is a large, bright room, and there are four boys in it. He has got plenty of cupboards and drawers. We have brought loads and loads of stuff, but we did not fill them all. I think now that this was probably because we forgot to unpack his PE kit. I hope he remembers to do this before PE. Oliver if you are reading this there were two empty drawers in the chest of drawers that you share with the boy opposite, put it in there.
We unpacked everything and organised things. He has been saving books that he very much wants to read and has brought them all with him. This will be something to look forward to in quiet moments.
He brought Spider Man, to make his bed look homely, and we put his tuck box next to his wardrobe. They are allowed tuck in their dormitories. This is because they are grown up now.
We found the house master, and he invited us for a cup of coffee.
He lives in Duffus House with his wife and little daughters, and a large, shining black labrador. This latter would not go back into his house whilst we had our coffee. It curled up quietly and hid under the table, and the housemaster explained that it was frightened of the dishwasher. I wish Roger Poopy was frightened of some things, it might make him less of a bumptious idiot.
We liked the housemaster very much. He was tall, and young, with the sort of mad gleam in his eye that means you know that he leaps out of bed and swims across a loch before breakfast every morning, and then jogs up Ben Nevis in his afternoon coffee break.
Oliver has got to get up early and go for a run tomorrow.
We had a last half an hour together in the camper van, and then all new parents and boys met up in the common room. The boys had an awkwardly polite ten minutes and then found the table football game, at which point it turned into something of a noisy riot.
We made courteous small talk, which always terrifies me, and I hid behind Mark whenever the opportunity happened, and watched everybody else. Duffus House does not seem to have very many sophisticated supermodels among its parents, which was a relief, because it is always depressing to be the only one in the room who is very obviously not a trophy wife. Indeed, everybody was kind, and friendly, and by the end of it I had relaxed so much that we forgot that we were supposed to be dashing across to the other side of the school to listen to the headmaster talking to us, so we were late.
This did not matter, because actually it was exactly like a speech given by a headmaster to welcome new children to school. We all applauded and made mental notes to stay in touch even when we didn’t have something to complain about, and then it was over.
We said goodbye.
We hugged our son hard, to make it last, and then we left him, on the far side of the Wall, in the frozen North, although it wasn’t actually frozen because it is only September.
It is so terribly hard. It is the most thrilling thing in the world, and it would not be so splendid if it were easy. He is going to have a brilliant time.
I am just a bit quiet inside tonight.
