School Uniform

“I can’t believe you’re making me go back to school!” spluttered Mini-Me. “We’re half-way home and I’m literally SO starving I am literally going to eat my own arm!”

“Nice.  Though to be clear, I’m not making you do anything.  You happen to be strapped into the back of a car which I am driving.  And I have decided to do a totally inappropriate U-turn in the middle of this busy street, change the direction of the car, sit in traffic, do a breathtakingly hairy right turn across three lanes of fast moving vehicles to get into the road where your school is, and following that, firstly, find another parking spot and then try and get this car into it.  Oh, and whilst we’re back there, you may as well hop out and go and fetch your games bag which you’ve just told me you left on the astro-turf.  Outside.  For.  The.  Night.  Which, despite your confidence is not “just fine”.  So, no, I’m not making you do anything.  It’s literally pure coincidence.”

To understand the reason for my almost-calm determined reaction to Mini-Me leaving her games kit unaccounted for at school, imagine this:

4 pairs of white sports socks, 2 pairs of striped field hockey socks, a navy blue skort, a pair of navy blue athletic shorts, a light blue polo shirt, a checked field hockey shirt, a pair of navy sweat pants, a navy hoodie, a navy fleece, a navy fleece with a waterproof coating, a navy beanie hat, a pair of white indoor sneakers, a pair of astro-turf sneakers, a pair of studded hockey sneakers, a swim suit, a navy towel, a light blue swim cap, a pair of goggles and a personally fitted bright pink gum shield.  All branded with the school logo and all packed tightly into a branded wheel-along kit bag.  The size of a garden shed.  All taken to school on a Monday morning ready for the week and, except for this day, brought home on a Thursday night ready for me to wash.

It is quite a responsibility for an almost-eight-year-old to be in charge of keeping tabs on all thirty three items, I get that.  Especially an almost-eight-year old who is far too trusting of both other people and the British weather.  Though, to be fair, every single piece has her name on it.  Twice.  Named on the inside with name tapes, which were sewn on laboriously and beautifully by my mother.  Named on the outside with bigger name tapes, which were less laboriously and far less beautifully hot glue-gunned on by me.

School uniform is something that Mini-Me hasn’t dealt with before.  She’s experiencing her first few months in a British school and with the onset of more homework, detentions and assembly, has come a plaid kilt, a scratchy cardigan and a blazer.  But fortunately no hat.  At her age, I was forced to wear a brown felt almost-trilby to school.  At the time I hated it – looking back at pictures, I rocked it.  Plus brown gloves in the winter and white gloves in the summer, to go with the straw boater with a maroon ribbon.  And no, I wasn’t at school in the 1930s, though it does go some way to explaining my ability to mix a gin and tonic at the age of ten and my love of going on nature trails and making peppermint creams.  I lost my white gloves within a week or so and paid a friend in scented erasers to permanently loan me one of hers so that when we had to shake hands with our teacher at the end of the day, we each wore one on our right hands, stuffing our left hands into our blazer pockets.

Mini-Me takes great pride in her uniform.  She wears it exactly as the regulations stipulate, even doing up the very top button of her cardigan.  I tell her it looks like she’s about to be strangled.  She tells me “There’s a reason there’s a button there, Mummy,” and goes off to polish her shoes and brush her hair, putting it into a ponytail using regulation navy blue hair ties.  She is very prim.  To be honest, I worry occasionally that she’s a bit too prim.

By the time I was fifteen, I’d come to the stage where I hated my school uniform and, along with my friends, did everything we could to not follow the rules – sneaking in black sweaters to wear instead of green ones, tying our neckties in various ways in a vain attempt to get them to look trendy.  Add to this the fact that we no longer traveled on the school bus, but took public transport to get to school and we were desperate to not look like we went to the ‘posh girls’ school’.  Oh, and there were boys on the train, too.

One weekend, my best friend K, and I were home alone at her house.  Her mother traveled a lot for work, her father lived abroad and she and I loved nothing more than hanging out in her enormous rambling house right next door to school.  We even made quick visits there on Thursday afternoons when everyone else was doing cross-country running – a slight misnomer seeing as we were in the middle of Birmingham, that’s for sure.  The route always took us near her street, so we peeled off and went and watched TV and had a snack, before returning to school for the rest of the afternoon.

I was the ‘ideas’ and she was the ‘facilitator’.  This particular weekend, I suggested we did something to make our school skirts more fashionable.  She found the scissors and the sewing machine and got to work.  The skirts were paneled and I thought we should just undo the seams of one panel, cut it out and re-stitch the remaining panels back together.  So we did.

“Miss Cherry?” Came the voice of the Deputy Head on Monday morning, as I was slowly climbing the stairs to the fourth floor.  She shouted so loudly, her voice echoed round the stairwell and other girls, going to lessons, turned to look.  I ignored her, pretending I hadn’t heard.

“MISS. CHERRY?”  I stopped and leaned over the banisters.  She continued yelling up the stairs at me.

“IS THAT A SKIRT?  OR IS IT A BELT, WHICH YOU ARE WEARING THIS MORNING?”

The skirt was tiny.  As well as taking out a complete panel (a fifth of the skirt), I had shortened it by about four inches as well.  It was so tight, I could only really decently climb the stairs by going up sideways, as if sidestepping up the face of a ski slope.  On the upside – negating the detention and my mother’s sighing – the boys on the train had admired it.

As for Mini-Me, I’m going to make sure she has a really big pair of scissors and grows up with a best friend who can use a sewing machine.  Though firstly, I think I’m going to have to work on her top button.