He has gone, and we are two again.
I spent the day inscribing his name on the last bits of kit, running up and down the stairs finding footballs and pencil cases.
Roger tiresome Poopy pinched Oliver’s cricket ball out of his bag and chewed it, but Oliver thought it might have a better spin for being a bit rough.
We stacked his bags and his bike and SpiderMan in the back of the car, and the holiday was over.
We have just got back from depositing him at school.
It was a rather splendid arrival. The sun was shining, and the barbecue was going at full pelt, pervading the whole school with the most delightful smell, I think Mark would rather have liked to have stayed. There were boys everywhere, bounding about and yelling and clapping one another on the back with an enthusiasm I am glad to have outgrown.
We unpacked uniform and cricket kit and books and pyjamas.
Oliver stopped being Oliver as soon as we arrived. He leaves his first name at home. When he gets to school he has only a surname, which is abbreviated by the other boys to Ibby.
We heard it bellowed from all around us as we arrived. Half a dozen of his friends bounced up to us and tried to drag him away before we had even put his wellies in the welly shed.
It is such a completely masculine place. There are bikes and cricket bats and telescopes and rugby balls and table football and pictures of Darth Vader. There are sensible systems for dealing with hundreds of muddy boots without fuss. There are determined arrangements for boy-scrubbing, supervised by Matron. There are clean sheets and clean fingernails and ear-inspections. There are mountain bikes and remote-controlled cars and Warhammer and Lego and a climbing wall and more rugby than I can describe. There are valley games and army games and alien invasion games. There is a nurse for scraped knees and earache and bashed heads. There is more food than you can begin to think about, all of it designed to be plain and filling and solid, think pudding and custard, toad-in-the-hole and mash, with milk and biscuits at supper time and cereals and sausages at breakfast. Oliver eats far more at school than he ever would at home.
There are ten boys in his dormitory this time, and he is Dorm Captain again. One boy is having a difficult time, Oliver thinks, and needs some kindness. Some boys are a bit noisy and need to be reminded to be quiet. One boy has not been a boarder before, and it is about time, Oliver said firmly, he will be much happier boarding than being a day boy.
His class are not little boys any more. The little ones, the scared eight-year-olds who still think of themselves by their first names, look very small, far too little for boarding school. Oliver will be a senior next term, a seasoned boarder, trusted to sleep in the attics and no longer in need of a bedtime story. Oliver is a grown-up. The headmaster was quite right when we went to visit for the first time. “Trust us, he will be fine with us,” he said. “How many boys have you had? I’ve had hundreds.”
He could not have been more right. We could not have hoped for a braver, calmer, more confident boy. School has been brilliant.
We will miss him very much. We miss them both. It is odd being a family of two: but we could not ever hope to compete with school.
Two weeks until we see him again.
