Is that school I see on the horizon?

This last couple if weeks of the holidays have highlighted that peculiarity of being caught up in transformation.  There have been moments when the next step – starting secondary school – has hung over us Damoclean style and there have been moments when “being too big” for something has become a realisation unprepared for.

“I hate school.”  It’s that time again.  There have been lots of questions about going up to comprehensive and lots of questions about the answers given.  It’s all the usual stuff about nerves and subjects and whether I’d enjoyed comprehensive or not.  I’m not sure the fact that I enjoyed secondary school is very reassuring at the moment.  It’s going to be an interesting couple of weeks.  The Enfield-esque slouches, hoody down over the eyes and grunts that accompanied shopping for school stuff, the other day, perhaps indicates that it’ll be a very long couple of weeks indeed.  Thankfully, as well as school starting so too does her weekend club: that’ll give her something to hang on for at the very least.

I’m finding it difficult to comprehend exactly what she’s going through.  I was the last of loads of siblings who had gone through the school I attended – Mum had a semi-permanent seat on the PTA committee from the late 60s through the 80s.  It was the most natural thing to go from one school to this next one.  Ignorance is bliss, I suppose.  My one’s experience is quite the opposite; so her uncertainty is perfectly understandable.  I hope I’m finding the right ways to help make the transition as smooth as it can be.

We went out for a walk and found ourselves in the vicinity of one of the larger parks in the area.  Over we walked.  Daughter has a love of the swings and a love of the, what we call, “turnie swing” too.  Right from her very first park experience she has adored being spun and twirled on those things.  It exhausts me!  It is a very firm connection though and one I adore too.  She quickly sat on the version in this park and off we went.  It’s like a place of comfort for us.  As soon as the rhythm is established and she’s off in orbit she starts to speak.  Her thoughts fall out and stuff that’s on her mind becomes articulated.  The movement gives a freedom of release.  It’s quite wonderful.  Of course, the park is a busy one.  Daughter gives way, and looks for something else to go on.  I found myself looking at her and her seeing that, for the first time, she is actually a bit too big for the park she is in.  There’s hardly a child in the place that stands taller than her waist – although there are a fair few who are closer to her age than their size might show.  For the first time, between us at least, there was a catch in her voice as she indicated that it was time to go.  Perhaps I imagined it.  It felt like an ending to an aspect of childhood – if you know what I mean? A step into a new aspect.

So, one last week of maintaining the screen time deal and allowing her to enjoy her time before the term starts.  One last week of making sure her checklists, physical and psychological, are checked and that the first walk up to the school gates can be one of confidence.  I am amazed at the daughter she is now.  She is such a funny, creative and compassionate person.  It is wonderful to have spent this time with her and see how she operates, how she lives and learns and how she looks at the world.  I know I am as nervous as she is about her move to secondary school – in some ways nothing has changed at all since I was her age and taking the step that she is now…and, of course, everything has changed and the step she is taking is going to be one into a world of constant change and demand and challenging experience.  It is, as once one of her favourite cartoons shows would have us believe, Adventure Time.

Just like York's Grand Old Duke...

The last couple of weeks have been quite odd.  These have been the first two weeks of the summer holidays and they have highlighted a couple of aspects of my life now that I’d never had to consider before.

The first week saw me and daughter together.  It was lovely having all this time with her, especially after having instigated a minimum time allowance for screens.  She is something of a gaming enthusiast and I fully understand and appreciate how she loses herself in these worlds she creates and plays within.  I was the same when I was her age.  The only difference was that I was engrossed in my Airfix soldiers and she is playing her games whilst staring at a screen.

My summer holidays, when I was her age – in fact any school holidays/weekends (after some involvement in sport)/days off from school – went: breakfast, a bit of TV and, after having been told to go out and do something less boring instead, I would go upstairs and refight World Wars One and Two – mainly Two.  I would disappear into my bedroom for the day.  Sometimes me and my cousin would take the battle out into the garden.  That would be it.  From start of the holidays to the finish, with a two week break to go to Porthcawl…although I would always find room in my bag for a few platoons and a tank.

It is exactly the same as her and her gaming.  She is engrossed in worlds she builds and interacts in or in combat and battles online.  She would spend all day doing this – she did for the first couple of days of the holiday whilst I gave her her head and let her just come down from quite a busy and involved term.  Then I told her she could only have a couple of hours a day on the machine.

She moaned.

Then she tried to irritate me into capitulation.

Then we started to go out and about and go for walks and head to the park and stuff.  Then she got a hold of a book and pen and started doing some drawing and did a bit of writing for her new school and stuff.  It’s been a good week.  Lunch out and about, or not.  A quick in and out of the library and stuff.  Really lovely.  I’ve mentioned before that this is the time where she’s still happy to hold hands as we walk down the road, or not, it’s not a big thing but its not an embarrassing thing.  She still laughs at the jokes and tries to be appalled at my lameness but can’t help sniggering through the “Shut up!”

This week she is on holiday away.  I’ve become quite lost without her.

I’m waking and doing all the routine stuff – the working , the exercise and that … still attempting to learn some German…Mein Deutsch ist schlecht…sehr schlecht... and then I hit a wall.  I should be writing, prepping for work, reading.  I’ve managed to proof one piece for a project and read and sort of constructed a website for another project but I’ve lost the drive, this week. The bit of why I’m doing it isn’t here and it’s knocked me out of kilter.  Silly really.  I should be making the most of the time.  This, for instance, has taken far too long to write.  Too many attempts.  Too many days of thinking about it and not writing anything.  Instead I’ve been procrastinating or prevaricating or, as it as described to me on Twitter today, appsturbating (Thanks Bret Douglass).  I’ve been sitting in a morass of lethargy and I need to shake myself up.

I took the first step yesterday, Thursday.  I got myself up and out and visited Gloucester Cathedral.  Beautiful.  I managed to complete this.  I have further website ideas in mind now and shall be on to them tout and suite.  Of course, It is Friday today and so the week of daughter away comes to a close.  I’m back with her next week and all this time will have gone away.  Ironic.  In fact, there must be a German word to describe it somewhere?

Why I'm here.

That was a tumultuous week and a bit!  Every reason why I am back in this country was played out and I’ve never felt more helpless in all my life.

So, the show went well.  It was everything you expect a school show to be: celebratory, difficult to hear at times, excellent comic timing, full of glances off stage and into the audience, first class playing to the spot on the wall at the back of the hall.  It was superb and brought the house down.  The thrilled looks on the faces of the pupils made it all worthwhile.  The grip that daughter had on me in the hug at the end I can still feel around my neck.  She was beaming.  It’s why I’m back here now.

After the curtain calls were the last few days of the school year.  A trip to a pub to hear about a World War Two dogfight, some squash and a play in the local park.  Daughter was happy for me to come along.  She knows that I am fascinated by war stories.  Watching her, afterwards, sitting with her mates for one of the last times at school and eating her lunch was a beautiful sight.  Friendships will grow and evolve and change over the years and this last snapshot of, not innocence exactly but childhood, perhaps more correctly, was just delightful.

That has been the mark of the past couple of weeks.  We are entering the transition phase.  I’m now told to “shut up” every minute for each of the banal Dad joke phrases and promises that slip out of the mouth in a purposeful attempt to make her smile.  She is on the cusp of genuine embarrassment for the “olds” - you know, that part of growing up where independence is marked out with shrugs and tuts and despaired pouts.  At the moment she is still happy to hold hands as we walk down the street and, even though I’m being told to shut up, she’s telling me so through a smile still, and barely contained giggles.

And then we had the Leavers’ Assembly and I cried.  I cried because they all stood up in turn and spoke about an aspect of their year they had enjoyed or had been of significance to them.  Daughter stood up and spoke about learning the haka that had been written for them by a colleague of mine back in NZ.  Then they played a video of them performing the haka.  I had not seen this.  Daughter had made much of learning it at the time but then wouldn’t do it for me or kept saying she forgot the words and whatever excuse she could come up with.  I don’t think she did this completely on purpose but for the video of the whole class doing the haka to come on to the screen in the hall did for me.  I cried.  I’m about to cry now.

After that they sang a Bugsy number and sang a bit more and I cried again.  I am in awe of daughter.  I know that she feels these times as important.  She is looking forward to secondary school but has, as you would expect, all the nerves and butterflies that go with a step like this one.  But she has strength and guts inside her that I don’t know where she gets them from.  The last four years of her life have been an avalanche.  At each moment she has kept herself and kept going.  She is incredible.  I hope that the bond we have now will help us through the next years, especially when she gets to the part where she starts to ask questions of me and why I turned her life upside down.

Now we have the holidays.  I told daughter she could be lazy for the few couple of days off.  She took me at my word and has been exactly thus.  Next she has the duty of family visits and trip away to look forward to.  She’ll soon have “have you done that homework?” ringing in her ears and she’ll be getting ready for another tumultuous week in September. I’ll be helpless again.

"We could have been anything that we wanted to be..."

The final “La la la, lalalalaaaa” ended and I had a tremendous lump in my throat.  The dress rehearsal for Bugsy Malone finished.  The kids on the stage held their jazz-hands pose and the gathered teachers and kids from lower classes applauded and cheered.  I had to quickly wipe a tear from my eye.  I may have to do that again just now.

School shows are magnificent.  They are an obvious celebration of the talent and the determination of the children who get up on stage and place themselves in an extremely vulnerable position.  The courage taken to step up, don a costume and belt out a line or a song is enormous.  Its effect was right there on the stage, right in front of me.

It was there again at a local fair, when the kids gathered to sing a few of the songs from the show to entice an audience for their performances, this week.  You could feel the effect and you could hear it; not just in the voices of the children singing but in the “Wow!” that greeted the first soloist who sang.  They ran out of wows.  Each soloist in turn was beautiful and beaming with confidence.  You could put it down to childish naivety but these are all on the cusp of adolescence, all in the transition from primary to secondary, all very certain that they are going to be uncertain in a month’s time and they walk across the threshold of a new school.  If any one group of kids had the excuse to be shy, it was this lot.  They weren’t though.  They were both loud and proud.  They were magnificent.

For all of you who did, the flashbacks to shows of your own may have already started.  Daughter was desperately excited to tell me they were going to be performing Bugsy; she knew I’d been in it at school too - just over thirty years ago, now.  And I remembered nearly every piece of dialogue and nearly every lyric.  The brain is a very curious machine.  Then again, allowing positive, pleasurable memories to be trapped for replaying isn’t very curious at all, I suppose.

I know there’s a comment about living in the past here, too but I’m too much of a coward to face trying to answer that one, just yet.

It is a proper school show too: the joyful and deliberate presentation of a bunch of amateurs having fun and feeling the pressure to entertain whilst also believing, much like Blousey, that they’re all on their way to Hollywood.  It is easy to pick the Britain’s Got Talent aspirees, the kids who want to “act” and those who’ve taken a part for a laugh and who can barely contain themselves on stage.  The talent on show is genuinely astounding.

I hope that each of these children look back on this show with the warmth and fond memories I look back on my Bugsy.  It isn’t just isn’t the time on stage, of course, it is the fierce bonds of friendship you thought would never be broken, the time when you were master of your universe.  It is bathing in the adulation of the echoes of applause you received; applause given with affection and relief and appreciation bundled together in that unique package that is the school show audience.  Parents, like me, who love seeing their child taking these steps, who have eyes for just one performer on stage but who are then won over by the ensemble and who see another kid in a different light; where did that voice come from?  How did she know the timing on that gag? When did he become so slick a mover?

For every lobster in a Nativity there’s thousands of Tallulahs and Blouseys out there carrying the song, thousands of kids who’ve been told to “Quit doin’ that, Knuckles!” or fallen off their chair at the mention of Dandy Dan.  This collective wallow in nostalgia and rose tint is a wonderful thing. Remember when all you had to do was give a little love?  And there I go again, having to do that tear wiping away thing. “La, la, la, lalalalaaaa.”