It is over.
Oliver’s prep school days are over and gone for ever.
I have cried like a girl.
The day started with the Leavers’ Service in the beautiful school chapel. This is one of the loveliest churchy places I have ever visited, it is painted and patterned and colourful, plenty for a bored little boy to look at whilst the headmaster is going on after breakfast every morning.
The place was packed to the seams with parents and boys, with the choir gleaming at the front. We found out afterwards that they had only arrived back from their camping trip this morning. They had been shoved into the showers for a hasty scrub, and tipped out to scramble into their choir robes.
The last camping trip had been wild camping, where you have to dig a hole when you would prefer a bathroom. Oliver said that he had come to appreciate home very much. I don’t know what the actual boys looked like pre-shower, but I have unpacked the washing, and it was not lovely, I can tell you.
A previous headmaster once told us that the stunning organ music in the chapel always made him cry, and that he was discreetly mopping away a tear one morning when he noticed a first former in the front row excitedly nudging his companion and pointing to it with great satisfaction.
They would have had a lot to point at this morning. I got halfway into the first verse of I Vow To Thee My Country, and I was lost. By the time we got to Jerusalem, and the feet walking on England’s mountains green, I had lent my spare handkerchief to the mother next to me.
We nearly lifted the roof off. It was an absolute bellow of song. I am a loud and enthusiastic singer, but I could barely hear my own voice this morning, and it was over far, far too quickly, for everybody except the first formers, who went belting off to charge about and practise their bowling in the sun.
We trooped out to Cannon Bank, which is where they keep the cannons, and admired the new bench donated by the departing parents en masse as a memento of our sons, and for the first time we managed to catch up with Oliver, who seemed to have become one enormous freckle.
He was in uniform, but not quite.
The boys were not wearing their school ties. Instead, they were all sporting brand new ties, almost like the school ones, but not quite, and too long for them. They were not boys’ ties, but men’s. They were the ties belonging to the Old Boys’ Association, the Old Aysgarthians, of which they are now the very newest members.
We were all invited for lunch, because it was our sons’ very last meal there, and we were sharing it. Obviously it was not an ordinary sort of meal, because there were generous helpings of wine, and the lovely Indian chef had been allowed to cook all of the things that he likes to cook, instead of being obliged to turn out boy fodder like sausages and baked beans the whole time.
Today it was gorgeous, a buffet with fresh salmon and a creamy curried chicken, spicy beef and prawn salads. Every mouthful was sublime, and of course the boys ignored it all and dived straight into the pudding. The pudding was brilliant as well, thick cheesecake on the lightest of crusty bases, with mounds of strawberries. Oliver complained that the chef had messed about with the strawberries as well, and he had, they had been rubbed with fresh mint leaves, and were magnificent. He is wasted in a boys’ school, bashing out his days cooking jam roly poly and pizzas.
The headmaster spoke to us.
He spoke for a long time.
He talked about every boy, and imagined where they might be in twenty years’ time. This was creasingly funny, littered with dreadful puns, and must have taken him at least a couple of bottles of wine to compose.
Oliver, due to his success in vanishing during games like German Spotlight, was tipped to join the Secret Service and have a career in espionage. He thought that Actual Head Boy would be the one to be Prime Minister, and I can’t remember what he predicted for Prime Minister To Be, something dramatic and lucrative probably, and Son Of Oligarch, who is brilliant but quite, quite reckless, might have had a narrow escape from prison. The naughtiest boy in their year came back to school once he had made a million, and donated a fund for a seat in his name, to be situated outside the deputy head’s office.
…and then it was over.
We filled the camper van with filthy camping gear and tied his bike on the back, and chugged up the drive honking the ridiculous horn and waving madly.
He is an Old Boy.
Have a picture of them all on their very last night of school.
