We got up early this morning which was hardly a chore at all after our splendidly relaxed night last night.
It was an important thing to get ourselves organised because we had an appointment at Oliver’s school at three o’ clock to talk about his Future with the headmaster. Oliver’s future, obviously, not the headmaster’s, which I am quite sure the headmaster can manage to organise perfectly well without input from us.
We dashed round getting all of our morning jobs done and then had got to get ourselves polished up and shiny before we went.
I am never very sure about the correct costume for meeting a headmaster, whether I ought to wear a skirt or a suit or whether jeans would be all right. It isn’t even as if I can ask him: of course being a headmaster he is terribly polite and even if he was smothering back hysterical laughter at my peculiar combination of uncoordinated clothing he would never, ever mention it, and so I will never find out.
I put on my favourite skirt and a shirt I covertly borrowed from Lucy, which is one of the enormous advantages of having an older daughter, especially one who is not there, and some boots which Mark thinks look sexy but which I never wear because the heels make my feet feel elderly and sorry for themselves.
I asked Mark if he thought it all looked all right but it was a waste of a question because he only noticed the boots, which wasn’t much help.
It is a bit of an expedition across the bleakest of the fells to get to Oliver’s school, and would usually take about two hours if it were not for the Kendal River Crossing Adventure on the way. Unfortunately, since the floods, about five hundred of Cumbria’s bridges have taken early retirement due to ill health, and several of them are in Kendal: so we set off at twelve, and arrived at about quarter to three, which was just time to be given a fortifying cup of coffee before being ushered into The Presence.
The headmaster is a jolly impressive sort of being, I can tell you. He has a formidable grasp of information that would put many a public prosecutor to shame.
He had clearly read and absorbed Oliver’s entire file, which impressed us a very great deal. He remarked on a picture drawn by Oliver aged six, his educational history to date, and his current assessments. He had at his fingertips information about Oliver’s birth and early years which would have escaped half of the family. He knew about our general financial position, about Lucy’s educational achievements and the occupations of Numbers One and Two Daughters.
In conclusion to all of this, he kindly explained to us that we must not give up hope where Oliver is concerned, because his performance is entirely ten-year-old-boy average, which, he pointed out, for a left-handed dyslexic is not bad going.
This was considerably better than I had expected, because I have long harboured suspicions that our son might not have any gifts whatsoever, unless you count the ability to massacre approaching zombies, but the headmaster assured us that this was not the case, although he had his doubts about the usefulness of zombie massacre capabilities when it came to impressing senior schools. He said, with convincing enthusiasm, that Oliver was exactly the sort of boy that schools liked to have around, and that he would personally call the head teachers of the schools where he thought Oliver might do well, and tell them so himself.
We left feeling somewhat reassured, if not exactly brimming with confidence for Oliver’s marvellous future. The head suggested a school in Dorset, not Sherborne but Milton Abbey, which spends Wednesday afternoons being military cadets, and although in the last few years it has opened its hallowed portals to the dreaded Girls, there are not many of them and it is still very largely a fairly traditional school for boys, and indeed has only recently abandoned the practice of fagging – less than ten years ago, to my fascinated astonishment. I don’t think David Copperfield is on its list of Old Boys, but I would not be surprised.
The headmaster thought that Oliver might do rather well there, and we looked it up online when we got home, it might be all right.
The head is going to write to them, and we are going to go back in February when Oliver will have had an assessment and we will know a bit more about his chances at Common Entrance and how he is likely to get on.
Being a parent is such a troublesome business. I get quite worried enough about whether or not he is wearing his thermal vest and eating sufficient nourishment to avoid scurvy.
I wish I knew if killing zombies would turn out to be a transferable skill.
