Primary school drama has a rule which is a variation on Chekhov’s gun principle: if your child has a part in the school play they won’t get to speak until the end of the final act. And you’ll have to sit through the part of every other child before their moment finally comes.
You will have to go. You will have to go and sit on a very small chair for a very long time, watching other people’s children perform ineptly before you get your ten seconds of joy at your own darling’s turn (which you won’t get to see properly anyway as you’re tasked with filming it).
The school calendar is peppered with special events which, for the children, represent welcome breaks from the monotony of the three Rs and the chance to be excitable with friends; for parents, however, they are fraught with problems, both logistical and social.
The former comes in the way of challenges that would stump most candidates on The Apprentice: ‘I need an Egyptian pharaoh costume.’ ‘When for?’ ‘Tomorrow morning.’ But this is nothing compared with the minefield of dealing with the other parents. They may not be your cup of tea in any number of ways – but should you make this known it won’t be you that suffers but your offspring: ostracisation from the birthday party circuit is the real danger. You must offend no one.
The big set-pieces are the fêtes, Christmas and summer. Parental participation is mandatory so all you can hope for is one of the cushier jobs. Perhaps the most desirable is running the book stall but dismiss those fantasies of unearthing a first edition of The Story of the Treasure Seekers: your stock will feature a lot of J.K. Rowling in paperback but precious little E. Nesbit in hard. The worst is the coconut shy. Who on earth thought giving eight-year-olds cricket balls and encouraging them to throw them violently was a good idea? The chap running the shy – the shyster, as it were – can find himself directly in the line of fire.
If your school is church-affiliated, there will also be three church services. Christmas tends to be the nicest: a few carols, a little re-enactment of the Nativity with a role for everyone, no painful dialogue and the school sorts the costumes: perfect. Easter is more visceral: 11-year-old boys seem to take naturally to sadism so they carry off Romans taunting Jesus on the way to Calvary rather well. The strangest is Harvest Festival in which the bounty of God’s earth is celebrated with the presentation of old tins of baked beans and anything fresh is banned on health and safety grounds.
There are class assemblies once a term, which you will be required to attend – and at which you’re also expected to be a short-notice costumier.
You will have to sit on a very small chair for a very long time, watching other people’s children perform
A sheep, a police officer, Mary Seacole, that pharaoh – who knows what outfits you’ll be required to conjure up? Certainly not you until just hours before curtain call. Then there are the volunteer requests: ‘Parents, we are looking for helpers to accompany Year 5 on our coach trip to the Roman Verulamium Museum.’ Thanks, but I’d rather be torn to pieces by wild animals in the Colosseum. Even that’s preferable to the truly heavy stuff, however: ‘We’re looking for candidates for the position of treasurer on the board of school governors.’ Shudder.
There are also the ad hoc events: ‘Meet your fellow new reception parents’ soirées, fund-raising quizzes, sometimes even a PTA cheese and wine party like it’s still 1975. The single worst is the family disco. Parents drink too much wine from plastic cups, the playlist features ‘Baby Shark’, Pharrell Willliams’s ‘Happy’ and ‘What Does the Fox Say?’ and the children scream throughout as if they were at a One Direction concert at Wembley. Other parents may even try to cajole you into dancing. You should cite a sports injury as your reason for declining rather than intense disinclination.
The best party by some distance is the Year 6 leavers’ party because, in a nod to their impending lives at secondary school, parents aren’t allowed to attend.
But a word of warning: that leavers’ party, a pseudo-prom for 11-year-olds, is the end of primary-parenting suffering, yes. Though all this will very quickly seem a golden age, now irretrievably lost.
All that effort to prevent your child hating you and yet within weeks of starting Year 7 – and, with it, big school – you’ll find they barely speak to you. They’ll retreat to their bedroom to begin their metamorphosis into an awful teenager. You won’t just have lost all the hassle that once seemed endless, you’ll have lost that daily intimate contact with your child. And it will hurt.
By the time they hit 14 you would quite happily sign up to be treasurer of the governors or sit through any number of interminable school plays just to go back.
So try to enjoy it while it’s there.
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