May Contain Nuts (33 page)

‘Yes.'

Miss Reynolds raised her eyebrows at her deputy with a look that suggested he might be speaking out of turn here.

‘So let me put it to you again. Do you think it is possible that you were mistaken? That what you saw was Mrs Chaplin's daughter, who would obviously have a strong family resemblance to her mother? That's who you saw, wasn't it, Ruby?'

Ruby looked at me and her mother and shook her head. ‘No. It was Mrs Chaplin …' she said quietly. Ruby had thrown away her last chance. All she had to do was go along with a gift-wrapped lie that was being presented to her, that would allow everyone to get out of this with a little dignity intact, but instead she rose above all that and took the far more difficult option: she did the right thing. I cannot pretend that it did not move me nearly to tears to see it. Especially as Ruby herself began to well up, her frustration at this incomprehensible injustice finally spilling over.

‘No one believes me but it's true …' she whispered as the tears ran down her cheek and were wiped away by her mother, who only had one card left to play.

‘If we were white and she was black, you would believe me and not her,' said Ms Osafo, standing up to leave.

‘I beg your pardon?' blinked Miss Reynolds over her glasses.

‘If we were white and we told you that a black family had cheated, you'd believe the white people not the black.'

Miss Reynolds shook her head sadly. ‘I'm disappointed that you have accused us of racialism, Ms Osafo, though not surprised. As a matter of fact we have several coloured children at the school, including the son of the Nigerian ambassador, and we've even gone to all the effort of putting up basketball nets for him, so I think that proves we are not racialist, don't you agree, Mrs Chaplin?'

Ruby was just staring at me. I had made a liar out of her. There was a little less optimism in her watery eyes, as if all the knock-backs that she would experience for the rest of her life had suddenly loomed into view. She blew her nose on a tatty piece of tissue and gave me a look that said: I know that you know that I know.

‘Actually I don't feel very well,' I said into the silence.

‘There's a cup of Earl Grey tea going if that might help?' offered the deputy.

‘Mum, I don't want to come here now anyway …' Ruby whispered. ‘I want to go to Battersea.'

‘That's fine, darling, come on, let's go. We're not going to get nothing from here.' Ruby followed her mother out of the door and it slammed behind them. Miss Reynolds looked more disappointed than ever. ‘Double negative …' she sighed. ‘Not really a Chelsea College sort of family …'

‘Not really a Chelsea College sort of family …' repeated Mr Worrall.

‘See you in September, Mr and Mrs Chaplin … I hope you'll be coming to our newcomers' assembly. One last thing, here at Chelsea College we do pride ourselves on our discretion and I'm sure you'll be able to support us in that. Oh, and here's your daughter's poem back. It is amazing how much a child's handwriting can change!' – and she gave a conspiratorial laugh. But I couldn't return her little chuckle. I finally had the prize but it had turned to dust in my hands. I felt nervous and sick and disorientated all at once. And then the school bell went and I wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.

 

Kids Say The Funniest Things!

A hilarious collection of delightful real-life quotes from the little children of Spencer House Preparatory School
.

Collected by Alice Chaplin

£6.99 (or just priceless, bless ‘em!)

‘What do you mean, you only have one home? Where do you stay at weekends?' Bronwyn, aged 9

‘Mummy, the stupid chalet girl put my ski-pass in the wash.' Julian, aged 9

‘Molly didn't even know the difference between a gelding and a colt!!' Jemima, aged 11

‘I'm better than Kirsty and Molly at EVERYTHING.' Bronwyn, aged 10

‘No potato for me, thank you. I'm on the Atkins diet.' Druscilla, aged 10

‘Mum, why can't the nanny come in the same bit of the plane as us?' Charles, aged 7

Mum, Alice just called me a precocious little brat.' Bronwyn, aged 11

Finally it was September. The first day of term. We had made our decision, we had settled on our choice of school – whatever our reservations, we had to do what was best for Molly. She had to have a secure and happy teaching environment to compensate for those anxious parents constantly fretting about her education. I had to select a school that would turn her into a highly qualified adult, so that when the time came she could afford to put me in a half-decent old people's home.

The early morning traffic on the first school run of the year seemed less aggressive than usual: tanned drivers glowed with the warm goodwill of the summer holidays, car headlamps still sporting the sticky-tape eye-shadow they'd worn for their tours across the continent. Outside a dangerous wind was whipping through the dappled plane trees, spinning polythene bags up into the air and bringing down chunky angular twigs with leaves too green to fall yet. As I got nearer to the school I could see more and more children and parents, all headed in the same direction, mothers still allowed to clutch their darlings' hands for what might be the last time. Finally I pulled my 4x4 up outside the teeming gates of Chelsea
College. Dozens of other outsize vehicles were depositing fresh-faced children, all modelling stripy new blazers that it was hard to imagine them ever growing into. One young chap arrived on his own in a London cab and nonchalantly told the driver to keep the change. I sat there watching the scene for a while and turned and looked at the empty seat in the back of the car. Molly could have been one of those children heading in there today. Molly could have attended this private club of the privileged and cosseted. But twenty minutes earlier I had dropped her off at Battersea Comprehensive. I had kissed the top of her head, and then watched that shiny sweet-smelling hair disappear into the crowd. I had cast one last anxious look over my shoulder as I drove off, my view partially obscured by the ‘For Sale' sign in the back of our 4x4, but Molly was gone. And then I had driven up here to see for myself what I had surrendered. Just one last glimpse at the strange tribe I had inadvertently been part of for the past decade. Obviously there was a part of me that still wondered if I had made the right choice. That morning on the way to Battersea Comprehensive, I had reached Queen's Circus where I would have turned off for Chelsea Bridge.

‘Mum,' asked Molly, ‘why have we just driven round and round the roundabout four times in a row?'

David had been hard to convince that we could make such a giant leap. ‘This is Molly we are talking about, our real live daughter!' he exclaimed during one late-night discussion. ‘Not some model child on the end of a pole that we shove into the middle of the comprehensive to see what happens!' But I came to realize why he was so agitated about it all. It was because he just didn't know the answer. He knew more bare facts than anyone I'd ever met, but when he had to decide what was best for our children, the answer couldn't be found
on the cards of his
Trivial Pursuit Third Reich Special Edition
. David just had to trust me. The only fact I could offer was a gut reaction, an intuitive understanding. ‘I may not know the capital of bloody Mongolia,' I told him, ‘but I know what's best for our children.' He was quiet for a moment, but was unable to resist mumbling ‘Ulan Bator'.

I'd simply felt so uplifted when I went round Battersea, like an adopted child finally meeting her real parents. I was appalled by the hypocrisy of Miss Reynolds at Chelsea College. It reminded me of the darker side of me. And so I became resolute that Battersea was the only choice. In any case, the little fisherman's cottage on
www.lundy-properties.com
was snapped up by someone else.

Of course, I was still concerned about that old problem of class sizes in state schools. The working class is just too big. Maybe the comprehensives could adjust their curriculum to attract more middle-class parents like us, I wondered. Woodwork lessons could involve teaching children how to hover nervously behind a carpenter saying, ‘We tried to assemble it ourselves, but found the instructions a bit confusing …' The cycling proficiency test would simply require fifteen minutes sitting on a bike machine watching daytime television. School dinners would feature tiny portions of monkfish tail on asparagus soufflé, while table monitors led conversations about house prices and whether one should take the au pair skiing. But Molly would now be part of a society made up of children of all sorts of colours, different religions and varying social classes. She'd have friends who didn't think it was completely normal to put the au pair staring out of the back of the 4x4 alongside the golden retriever. She would meet Muslims and would learn that Islam wasn't all jihads and fatwas but was a peace-loving religion based on the belief that –
well, whatever it's based on. I can't say, I don't really know any Muslims. She'd grow up in a school in which all sections of society were represented – like the queue in the post office but with no one slapping the children.

Whether we could have ever crossed that social chasm without having our best friends make the leap with us, I don't know. William's born-again certainty undoubtedly helped persuade my husband. For a man who normally sat in the background making the occasional sarcastic comment, William was suddenly very loquacious on the subject. ‘Thinking you can get a complete education at private school is like going to Claridge's in Delhi and thinking you've travelled,' said William audaciously. ‘The whole journey of childhood is about learning that you are not the only person in the universe, that you are just one person in a society. First you have to learn to share with siblings, then you have to learn to consider friends and classmates; the biggest lesson of the first ten years of your life is fighting the infant instinct to push in and say “Me first!” and “Biggest piece for me!” But then all those overanxious parents like we were pay good money to send their kids to schools where they are actually taught “me first” and “biggest piece for me”, and it's no wonder they revert to grabby, greedy toddlers all over again. I want my kids to learn that they are
special
, but not that they are
better
.'

‘Sure, William,' I said standing on the doorstep, ‘but would Kirsty like to come to the park with us or not?'

Having spent so long indoctrinating our daughter on why she would be happiest at Chelsea College, we did not have very long to perform a complete back flip and now convince her of the exact opposite. What would be the best way to do this, we wondered. Leave a small typed erratum slip in her homework diary?
Please note: administrative error by parents
.
‘Darling, you'll be really happy at Chelsea College' should have read, ‘Darling, you'll be much happier at Battersea than that silly old Chelsea College, don't you agree?'
Or maybe we could hire a hypnotist. ‘You will forget everything your parents have told you about your new school … Yes, yes, you much prefer the other one … and while we've got you, you're going to remember to clean out the goldfish bowl …' In the end we just told her the truth. That the reason we didn't want her going to an aggressively academic school was the same reason that she didn't have to learn bridge with Ffion any more or go along to children's book club or do all those extra lessons that used to eat up every evening.

David and I didn't see F-f-f-fion and Ph-ph-philip socially any more, though Sarah and William kept us up to date with all the gossip. Apparently Ffion's life coach had recommended she commit suicide. Once when I had to be out early I did see her setting off for school at about seven thirty with her children's pasty faces pressed against the car window. If Ffion saw me, she didn't acknowledge it. The only annoying thing about all that was that Ffion and Philip's software idea ended up being a huge commercial hit, the computer craze of the year with parents and single people alike. Suddenly everyone was buying into this new obsession of designing personal league tables in which they or their children always seemed to end up in top place. I didn't sink to such tragic self-delusion. Ffion and Philip had struck gold and probably thought it finally proved their total superiority over everyone they knew, but of course I secretly knew it was me who had said to Ffion that you couldn't measure a child by just one exam result – the whole thing had been my idea all along, so in my personal league table I would have been way above the two of them.

As part of the formal closure of that hypercompetitive phase of Molly's life, I helped
her clear out her bedroom, filling a black dustbin bag with old exercise books, project folders, homework sheets and revision timetables. I read about one teenager in Hackney who had left his school and the following night burnt it to the ground, which is another means of achieving closure I suppose. After Molly and I had sorted her desk, we attacked the box files in the kitchen, emptying them of completed test papers and extra homework set by expensive private tutors. Hours and hours of her life were now being thrown away, or rather, had been thrown away long ago. We laughed at all these extra test papers now, like prison guard and inmate meeting as equals after sentence had been served. ‘If Simon has fourteen apples and eats twelve, what has he got?' I asked her. ‘Indigestion,' she replied, remembering the joke I'd always recited in the forlorn hope of extracting a smile during extra maths lessons.

‘What's this?' said Molly, suddenly pulling some test sheets out of an envelope.

‘Just some test papers, darling … Do you want to keep any of these booklets or shall I put them in the recycling bin?'