Look what you’re doing
Leavers’ Day OR Houseman prefers the whimper to the bang The prospect of Leavers’ Day on the last day of the academic year can cast a shadow over the last few weeks of the summer term. The approach of the summer holidays used to be as much of a morale boost for housemasters as it was for the boys, and could usually be approached as a gentle winding down process, with slightly less to do each day. Once upon a time, schools combined their big day with the Summer Half Term, but this has now moved to the end of term, which therefore finishes with a day many housemasters consider to be the most tiring and demanding of the entire school year, just when they are in the depths of exhaustion and the peak of stress. A schoolboy’s final day at school used to be an unremarkable moment. I remember a particular example after a few years in the house. A boy looked into my study. I was at my desk, writing a letter to a new boy’s parents. Once the Upper Sixth started to take, and then started to finish their A Levels, my thoughts moved on to next year’s new boys. (This is, of course, an incomprehensible thought for a leaving Upper Sixth Former, who naturally sees himself as the centre of the universe and does not imagine, or even believe, that we can have anything else to do once he has left school.) “I’m off now, sir.” “Sorry?” “I’m off. Leaving. Just came in to say goodbye.” “Leaving?” “Yes. Just finished my last exam. “ “Your last exam, of course. Yes, that was this morning. Physics. How did it go?” “Chemistry. Fine, I think.” “Good, good.”
A slightly awkward moment followed. I may not see this boy again, I thought. After managing his school life for the last five years and watching him grow from an awkward adolescent to a confident 18 year old, should I not regard this as a significant moment? Should he not? Fortunately, it was quite clear he felt no more need to be dramatic or emotional than I did, and just wanted to start his summer holiday. “Packed? Room organised? Is matron happy with it?” I asked. “All done, sir.” “Good. Well, good luck. Let me know how you get on.” If I had not been in my study when the boy looked in after that last Chemistry exam, he could quite easily have left without even that conversation. In this way, on each day towards the end of term, another boy would finish his final exam and leave, one by one almost, until there might be one boy left waiting to take the last A level paper of the season, usually Ancient Greek or Further Mathematics, until he had gone too. It seemed a natural way for things to finish: understated, nothing momentous, no celebration. The Lower Sixth became the senior pupils for the last few days of the year and, by the time the summer holidays started, probably thought they always had been. Then we had a new headmaster. The new headmaster was known to be a great admirer of forward-looking American educational policies. In America, of course, they do things differently. Not one to be restricted by the stuffy and stifling traditions of English boarding schools accumulated over the centuries, he would not be looking to the English establishment for ideas, but to the bright, exciting, innovative thinking of the New World. Among other things he liked the way American schools celebrated their leavers. We knew all of this and were prepared for plenty of innovation. But the housemasters were still slightly surprised by Leavers’ Day. At what we had approached as an unremarkable weekly break meeting early in the Summer Term he suddenly announced: “You ought to have written your speeches by now.” He said nothing more than that and he moved to a different topic. I spoke to the senior housemaster as we walked away from the meeting. “I think I must have missed a meeting at some point.” “I don’t think you’ve missed anything.” “Perhaps I didn’t read an email.” “I rarely read emails. I usually imagine that if I am being asked to do something important then eventually somebody will come and ask me to do it. Doing nothing is invariably the best approach to an apparently urgent problem. It either goes away or solves itself.” “But I have definitely missed something.” “Why are you so sure?” “Something he said this morning about speeches. ‘You ought to have written your speeches by now’, he said. What speeches?” “Oh yes. I noticed that. No idea.”
Autumn 2018
21
