Lots of girls and lots of boys, lots of smells and lots of noise

When my child was younger she couldn’t get enough of my fascinating tales. “Say again how you messed up the ballet show!” she would cry, or “Tell me that slightly implausible account of how you met Daddy.” And I would smile, and pull her on my knee, and begin. “Once upon a time, a handsome prince saw a beautiful princess…” and she would be rapt, I tell you, rapt. Recently though, her intellectual curiosity about me has dissipated; now I am mostly just the annoying person standing between her and her DS.

However, she still loves to hear about my schooldays, treating the notions of logarithm tables and standing up for your teachers with the same forensic disbelief as once did I over the slates and bloomers of my grandmother’s time. Man of the House is accorded more respect, because his Glasgow alma mater used the belt for minor offences (“Tell about being walloped on the bottom, Daddy, for forgetting the date of Bannockburn”), while my jovial primary head-master threatened to cane us daily but never did. But even my less dramatic stories get an attentive audience.

My secondary school had absurdist rules about the necessity of wearing navy blue knickers, but we soon realised no-one was going to check and reverted to our usual Snoopy pants. There was a lack of pastoral care staggering to today’s children. An anecdote which interests Thing One concerns the time I was in a car accident on the way to school, when I was eleven. No-one was hurt, but the car was wrecked and it was frightening. “You’re late,” snapped my teacher when I finally arrived. I mumbled an apologetic explanation about the crash. “Are you all right?” she said briskly, and when I nodded, said, “Well sit down then,” and I joined the lesson, trembling slightly from shock. A modern child would be comforted, and checked over, and possibly offered counselling, and quite right too.

Thing Two recently did a school project on Tanzania. I remembered doing something similar, the most exciting part of which was my carefully coloured-in map of Upper Volta falling off the wall and being lost forever behind a dusty radiator. Thing Two’s teacher had arranged the classroom chairs to resemble seating in an aeroplane. The children all made passports,  then they sat on the plane, and the teacher/air steward handed out sucky sweets to avoid ear-popping. When they ‘arrived’ in Tanzania, they changed into cool t-shirts and were given African food to try. “Is school better now or when you were little?” asks Thing Two, younger than his sister and still interested in my opinion. I tell him that it is so much better now, I could cry.

Beth Miller. Published in vivalewes.com and Viva Lewes handbook, September 2012

But the days grow short, when you reach September

It’s obvious TS Eliot didn’t have kids.

April is the cruellest month?

‘Cripes, what utter rot’, Viv would have cried, on hearing the first draft. If they’d had children, and if she wasn’t too incapacitated by her straitjacket for such forceful literary criticism, that is.

‘Listen love’, she’d have said, sweeping up rice crispies with a besom broom, ‘try again, but with the right month’, and to his blank, smoke-fugged face, would have snapped, ‘September, you rattle-brained rhymester. Now make yourself useful; take the damn rug rats to school.’

Ah, September. To the child-free, it’s merely a good month for a cheap holiday. To parents of school-age children, it’s the seasonal equivalent of a hearty clip round the ear.

I’m speaking in particular of that first morning back to school after what the pupils of Lewes Grammar might call the long summer vac. Well, OMG, as those pupils doubtless never say, unless extremely pressed by some tricky prep.

Even the least poetically minded parent will intone the modern blank verse of despair on that first day:

Oh bejesus I have quite forgotten
How to exit the house before midday
So what precisely is that festering
Greenly at the bottom of the school-bag
And hells teeth we didn’t buy new shoes she’ll
Just have to wear Crocs and tell me how did
We do this last year without a breakdown.

Of course, the first couple of weeks of August are also a shock, but for the reverse reason: the cold turkey withdrawal of school throws our quiet routines into chaos. At first, we attempt to impose order on the holidays with outings and structured activities and, okay, quite a lot of telly. Then, gradually, imperceptibly, we begin to go as native as our feral offspring. Meals only happen if someone can be bothered to nip down to Chaulas. Children scamper up trees you’re not allowed to climb in the Grange Gardens and won’t come down; they commit Lord of the Flies atrocities without reprimand; and bedtime is when they pass out on the floor after mainlining CBBC.

So by the time September comes creeping out of the dead land, we’re just not ready, frankly. We’ve finally worked out how to dance the ain’t got no childcare boogie, and settled hippy-like into our new random lifestyle. One minute we’re costing campervans on ebay, the next, we’re suddenly expected to spend whole days in Eliza Brown, helping a small savage shove their woodland-roughened Hobbit toes into fifteen variations of black lace-ups. Suddenly we’re expected to be inventive about making the first of that year’s 190 packed lunches (that’s per child and no, squeezy yoghurts are so last term).

Thing One’s school, thankfully, kicks off slowly this September with a couple of inset days, giving us one final straggly week of back to nature before shrugging on Viv’s straitjacket of disciplined life.

So excuse me for now: I see it’s three in the morning, and high time I got the dinner on.

Published in VivaLewes.com. Photo taken from MorningGuyEd.com