“Would you be angry if I covered a lacrosse pitch with loo paper?”This slightly leading beginning to an email was sent to Rupert yesterday, and alerted us to the fact that Bea had been up to mischief at school.
The girls have settled in enormously well. I have not had a single word of complaint, well at least not from them. They have made fabulous new friends, are loving their studies and just to complete their integration have now both been gated before they even got to half term.
Olivia put spot cream on someone’s toothbrush and Bea, along with 11 others in her year, for some reason decided that the lacrosse pitch would benefit from a carpet made of loo roll. This jolly jape was carried out at midnight as the rest of the school slumbered.
Both incidents are like something out of Malory Towers and I refuse to get angry about either. In fact I think that if they are up to (slight) mischief it’s quite a good sign. As my lovely Swedish grandfather Erik would have said: “You don’t want your children to be BORING do you?” I was also extremely pleased to hear from the school that “all 12 girls involved in the incident are saying it was a group effort and that no one person took the lead”. One of the best lessons one learns from an English public school is not to be a sneak.
So far, sending them to school has been a great decision. As it gets unbearably hot here, they are running around the countryside. Olivia is in the tennis team and has her first match tomorrow. Bea scored five and a half rounders yesterday and whenever I try to call Leo his phone goes on to answer machine. I finally got hold of him a couple of nights ago and asked him where he’d been for five days. “Outside,” he replied.
So far Leo has not been gated. He is too busy taking wickets, or playing with his new friends Hector and Harry (am now slightly wishing I had called him Horatio). Next week we fly over to take them to France for half term. Olivia of course can only stay three days because she has a “MASSIVE party” to go to with her friends.
I will be sad not to see her for longer, but wouldn’t want it any other way.
Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2013