May Contain Nuts (29 page)

He didn't list exam grades or awards or victories in sporting competitions but he did use the word ‘happy' more than once. He talked about ‘well-balanced children', ‘considerate children', ‘compassionate children', ‘kids discovering what they loved to do, children learning respect for one another', and it was like somebody talking a new language that I'd never realized I was already completely fluent in. It wasn't all upbeat and positive; he got very serious and quite scary about bullying, which he called the single greatest enemy to the happiness of a child in a school, and his determination not to tolerate bullying of any sort made me want to stand up and shout, ‘Yes, yes, yes!' He was inspiring, resolute, funny, moving and sincere. When the time came for us to ask about anything he might not have covered, the only question I could think of was, ‘Could you please become the leader of a political party so that I can vote for you to be prime minister?'

Battersea Comprehensive had got a bad reputation back in the 1980s when it was chronically underfunded, but it turned out that a desperate shortage of money was, in fact, a problem that could be solved by throwing money at it. The head of English with whom I chatted about all this was clearly very proud of their new ‘intranet' system and the new computer clusters and the interactive whiteboards, and I tried to pretend to know what he was talking about. I explained that Ruby was a friend of my daughter's; my child wasn't actually coming here. ‘Well, she managed to get into Chelsea College. She's very bright, you see, so we felt we had to go private …' I gabbled apologetically.

‘Mmm,' he concurred. ‘Whereas my children on the other hand are very stupid. That's why my wife and I felt they should go through the state system …'

‘Oh no, I didn't mean, well, I'm sure you have bright children here too …' I could feel my face going red.

‘It's all right.' He smiled. ‘We do have lots of bright children here, and before you ask, no, they are not held back, there are extension classes in most subjects. But a good education is about more that just how many grade As a child gets in their exams. You can't judge a school by its place on a league table.'

‘No,' I said absently. ‘Or a child …'

‘Sorry?'

‘Nothing.'

I was so happy that Ruby would be going to such a splendid comprehensive with all her classmates, just as Molly was going to a top school with all her friends. For a brief few days it seemed that all was well with the world. Surely now I could stop worrying so much that my hair was turning grey faster than I could have it recoloured?

But the golden age of peace and reassurance is always just over the next hill. Two days later Sarah was sacked from her job at Chelsea College. It was a terrible thing to happen to your best friend; a distressing personal humiliation that left one unable to do anything other than listen and nod in agreement.

‘I was good at that job …'

‘You were good at that job …'

‘She had no right to sack me …'

‘She had no right to sack you …'

‘It's a rubbish school anyway …'

‘Erm, yes, I expect it must feel like that to you right now …'

It had happened very suddenly. Sarah had not realized that all her questions about the school must have been irritating for the headmistress, but every anxious query about what subjects Kirsty would be doing, which class her daughter would be in, whether the children were allowed to have water in lessons (‘still
and
sparkling?') – each one was an accumulating black mark against this busybody mother.

Because I had been so impressed with the headmistress, I found a small part of myself secretly blaming Sarah for what had happened. Apparently the dismissal when it came had been executed with ruthless charm and good manners; the headmistress just didn't think Sarah was ‘a Chelsea College sort of admin assistant …' William said that this was the preferred upper-class phraseology for all forms of exclusion or dismissal. ‘Anne Boleyn learnt she was going to have her head chopped off when her husband said with a charming smile, “I just don't think you're a Henry VIII sort of wife.”' The head teacher hadn't said anything about withdrawing her daughter's place from the school, but Sarah was no longer so sure she wanted Kirsty to go there anyway.

‘You can't pull Kirsty out now. It wouldn't be fair to take her away from all her friends …' I reasoned calmly, quietly panicking inside.

‘Well, we've got nowhere else to go anyway. But Chelsea College is not so great, you know, Alice, not now I've seen it close up …'

‘Well, no school is perfect, especially if they've just sacked you. But we have to hold our nerve now …'

‘I mean, if a child doesn't fit their narrow mould of what an Oxbridge-bound pupil should be like, then they're just not interested in them …'

‘Wow, imagine Molly going to Oxford or Cambridge …' whispered the devil on my shoulder.

‘If a child presents them with a problem, they just expel them.'

‘No problem children to distract your child …' the devil continued.

‘They care more about academic averages than they do about the individual children.'

‘A school with high averages! How perfect for your kids!' countered the wicked voice in my ear.

‘And some of the children … well, they're just rude. Arrogant and rude. All their lives they have been told they are innately superior and perfect and they really believe it.'

Ah, but my children would never be like that … I thought. Because only my children are completely perfect …

But what had been a mildly humiliating rebuff for Sarah turned into a disaster a couple of days later when they received a letter informing them that since Sarah was no longer an employee of the school they could no longer justify giving a place to a pupil whose entrance exam result was below the expected standard. Although the note was dictated by the head teacher, it was signed in her absence – presumably by Sarah's replacement as admin assistant. I couldn't believe it. That charming liberal headmistress I had met – this must have been forced upon her by the governors or something. Sarah and William were utterly shell-shocked. Less than two and a half months until the start of the autumn term and suddenly Kirsty had no secondary school to go to. Sarah said they were appealing, and had even written to their local MP, but suddenly everything seemed uncertain once again. She wept and wept down the phone to me and at some deep level I felt this must somehow be connected with my initial misdemeanour.

I decided I would try to cheer them up by taking them on a surprise evening out to the theatre. ‘Is it the National?' quizzed Sarah as she climbed into the car, looking, I realized, a little overdressed for the occasion.

‘Not exactly …'

‘The Royal Shakespeare Company?' asked William.

‘Not Shakespeare, no – maybe England's second greatest writer …'

‘Fantastic!' said William. ‘It's that Jeffrey Archer play …'

At first I was pleased when I heard that Battersea Comprehensive would be doing the classic musical
Oliver!
A good Dickensian story, some great songs and a couple of weepies to boot; how would Sarah and William be able to resist that? But it was only when the performance began that I realized they were doing a reinterpreted version set in the present day. The songs had all been rewritten to say things like, ‘Who Will Buy This Week's
Big Issue
?' and ‘You Gotta Nick a Mobile or Two!' Fagin's gang consisted of a lot of dodgy-looking fifteen-year-olds with their hoods up. ‘The muggers looked worryingly convincing,' said William in the interval. ‘I wonder how much research they did?'

‘Interesting idea to make Oliver Twist an asylum seeker …' Sarah chirped bravely. ‘I suppose that has the stigma that an orphan would have had in Victorian times.'

‘Either that or they needed an excuse for why he could barely speak English.'

‘No, he just has rather a strong accent, that's all. Nice pictures …' I added as I finished my lukewarm cup of tea with biscuit. William was staring at the programme: a single sheet of folded yellow A4 listing the cast, with some fairly amateurish scratchy drawings round the edges.

‘Hmm … I think the Royal Academy is safe for another year.'

I had only meant to plant the possibility of this school in the minds of Sarah and William, but I found myself willing them to like it as much as I had, and I watched their every reaction to the teachers and the other parents. Please make the play better, I wished; make it so good they will think about sending Kirsty here with Ruby …

By the time Nancy successfully fought off Bill Sikes using Thai-Bo, I had developed a headache from facing the stage while trying to gauge Sarah and William's reactions alongside me. At the end William applauded politely, even though his mind was clearly somewhere else. We peeked in a couple of classrooms on the way out, and they nodded inscrutably as I pointed out the computers and the new sixth form and the art block. But they were very quiet. I feared that they were silently appalled by it all.

It was very subdued in the curry house afterwards. I realized it was impossible not to make a comparison with the operetta we had seen a couple of weeks earlier, and clearly the production at Chelsea College had been much, much better. None of us spoke as we pretended to stare at the menus that we knew off by heart. The only noise came from David breaking little bits off his poppadom as if he was working on some two-dimensional sculpture.

‘What are you doing?'

‘Trying to make Cyprus,' he replied, proudly holding up a shape I think we were supposed to recognize.

‘Very good,' I said. It looked like a bit of poppadom to me. He attempted one more tiny adjustment, but swore as the whole of the northern peninsula snapped off. ‘Shit! Cyprus has split in two,' he announced. ‘Appropriate enough, I suppose …' he added before dipping the
Turkish half of the island in the mango chutney and popping it in his mouth. ‘You have a go, William …' he said.

‘What?'

‘Making a country …'

William clearly wasn't really in the mood and lifted up the spiciest tub of pickle. ‘Chile,' he said.

‘Very good. Actually Chile is about the hardest country of all. It always snaps somewhere north of Santiago …'

‘David, I think they've got more important things on their mind …' and that was the cue for Sarah to break down in tears.

‘It's just not fair, everyone's got a school except Kirsty … Five different tests she had to take. Two and a half years' extra tutoring and for what? To have no school to go to, no place anywhere, totally rejected at the age of eleven.'

William put his arm round his wife and David looked a little sheepish as he popped Greek Cyprus into his mouth. I told her she might yet win her appeal to the governors at Chelsea and she wiped the tears from her eyes. The waiter looked a little concerned. ‘Is everything all right, madam?'

‘Yes, yes, it's just this hot Indian food …' she said sniffing, pointing to the little tub of cucumber raitha.

‘Well, I just wanted you to see Battersea …' I mumbled. ‘Just in case it might be an option. But I know the play was a bit … well, I've never seen a version of
Oliver!
in which Fagin was served with an antisocial behaviour order.'

‘No, splendid idea …' announced my husband, clearly gearing up to launch into a sarcastic overdrive. ‘In order to plant the idea of sending their privately educated middle-class child to the local comprehensive, you took them to a play about an upper-class orphan abandoned into a den of kids from the criminal underclass. Perfect! Spot on!' And at least this prompted Sarah to laugh a little.

‘Look, I know the Chelsea College play was much more impressive—'

‘Yes,' said William, cutting in. ‘That's exactly what Chelsea's play was. More impressive.'

‘But you can't judge schools by which one put on the best play.'

‘No one said Chelsea did the best school play,' he asserted. ‘I said theirs was more impressive. Different thing entirely.'

Sarah looked up from where she had been dejectedly pushing some pickle around her plate. ‘What do you mean?'

‘Chelsea's play was more impressive because that was the object of the exercise. To impress. Don't you see? Chelsea's play was put on for the parents. Battersea's was for the children.'

The waiter carried a loud sizzling curry dish behind me and for the first time ever I didn't turn round to see what it was. It sounded like my insides felt.

‘In
The Pirates of Penzance
, the child who was the very best singer sang the solo …' he continued. ‘So what? They know he can sing; what does anybody gain from that? But did you see the expression of the child who sang the solo in
Oliver!
She wasn't a trained vocalist, but she tried her very hardest and then gave that little smile when everyone clapped and cheered; you knew that this was the biggest thing that she'd ever had to do in her whole life. After she came off the stage did you see the way her teacher crouched down and told her how fantastically she had done?'

‘Er, no, I was watching you two most of the time …' I stammered.

The waiter wheeled a trolley of curry dishes beside the table and ostentatiously wiped the plates as he placed them in front of us.

‘Battersea's play wasn't staged to impress us, the parents,
the consumers,' continued William, ‘it was put on to help the children develop, to build their confidence, to teach them about creating something together, attempting things they had never thought themselves capable of. The Chelsea play kept the shy children off the stage, banned the mediocre singers from singing; Sarah told me that the other lead performers in
Pirates
were not even from Chelsea College. They borrowed the best singers from another school!'