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.

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.

It is the Michaelmas Term at St Elowen’s.

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