Beat by beat

A term at St Elowen’s

A boarding school is not really a place. It is a year, with a shape, kept the same on purpose so that a girl always knows roughly where she is in it. A visitor who comes back in the spring will find a different school from the one she left in the autumn, and that is deliberate too.

Which, if you were wondering, is the autumn one.

Arrival: The drive, the trunks, Matron and the name-tapes, the dormitory, and the terrible first night.
The first days: Getting lost. Lessons. The maze of the house. The raw second morning, which is somehow worse than the first.
The Welcome Feast: A procession of food designed to make a child hungry. The founding legend, read by the head girl. The school song. And the Star of Promise, hidden in the pudding.
The rhythm of term: Chapel and the Latin grace. Prep. Lock-up. Bounds. House points, posted on the board every Friday, in green, amber and scarlet.
Letter day: Every Sunday, the whole school writes home, and no girl is excused. And because there is no Sunday post in England, a letter that comes on a Saturday must be carried about in a pocket for a whole day, unopened, like a secret.
The hockey match: Against Bramblehurst. The Duke touched for luck on the way out. We play beautifully, and we shake hands, and we do not always win.
Half Term: St Elowen’s does not send its girls home. It holds a Visiting Day instead: tours, free time, a concert, and parents’ tea. The girls whose families cannot come are quietly folded into the families who did.
The Autumn Fair: Stalls, a three-legged race, a tug-of-war against the village (the village wins), and an art competition.
The Lantern Parade: The most beautiful thing in the school year. Hundreds of lanterns, by house, in house colours, processing from the Great Hall down into the Pinetum at dusk.
Going-home day: Name-tapes. Trunk inventories. Matron’s list, which develops opinions. And one lost games shoe, found in the coal scuttle.
The House Cup: Presented on the last day of the summer term. Oak has held it three years running. Elm would very much like it back.