This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
So Hector took his Common Entrance exams, and now … we wait. With distinctly un-bated breath. Frankly, given his performance on multiple past papers I’d have to conclude that if we were offered a place anywhere vaguely selective, or even heard-of, that the VAT on school fees had hit the prep school market hard.
Yes, since October we’ve been averaging one paper per evening (shoot me now), plus enforced news-watching followed by news-related practice interview questions. The upshot: Will is now slightly better informed. Hector is still a complete loose cannon, likely to argue, for example, that Gaza is in Ukraine.
And no, I’m not doing that peculiarly British thing of talking my child down and then marvelling at their freakishly good performance on the day (side issue: why do American moms never ever do this? Or French ones?). No, I actually know the odds. Look at it this way, one of the English papers included this question:
There is no such thing as the supernatural. Discuss.
Hector, poor lamb, told me proudly that he wrote about “junk food”. When I queried this, it became clear that he thought “supernatural” referred to superfoods vs ultra processed foods because he’d recently heard his sisters arguing about UPFs vs “Ultra-Natural Foods” (whatever they are).
I used to hear these things and scream, now I just die slightly inside. This is what my therapist calls “Radical Acceptance”. It began with Hector not walking until 18 months and has steadily, consistently continued in this vein. He’s basically Will, in child form.
My friend Pandora helpfully told me about a study which said children who are tutored actually have lower academic confidence than those who aren’t. She seemed to think this was staggeringly counterintuitive, and an argument for not-tutoring.
If my mother hadn’t kept promising me a nose job, would I have had such a complex?
It made perfect sense to me. Look at this way, if my mother hadn’t kept promising me a nose job, would I have had such a complex about my nose by the time I was ten? Still, I could have done without Pandora’s usual pass-agg commentary on my “choices”.
Anyway, I’ve been panic-applying to lots of non-selective tiny schools like Portland and Northbridge House for Hector, and trying to tell myself that pastoral care is definitely more important than results. At this point we’re heading Steiner-wards, and are going to have to make out that we actually want Hector to be a drop out. That we welcome and applaud it.
On a separate note, I’m seething that we don’t have a laundry chute. These are basically the new sliding pantries or library ladders — the thing you didn’t know you longed for, until you saw someone else’s.
The someone else being Pandora (again) whose husband is a major architect and so has the energy to completely redesign their house in Clerkenwell every few years whilst they move into her parents’ house which is conveniently close to Wetherby’s.
Obviously the ultimate aspiration would be someone else permanently responsible for the laundry … But since this is lottery win territory, what with all the tutoring, child psychology to cope with tutoring, my own therapy bills and the price of ski passes, I have to content myself with coveting a long hollow tube instead.
Just imagine! The rage I could vent, hurling Will’s worst 2003 jeans and rugby shirts down it. The risks I could take, dropping the kids’ mouldy water bottles from their bedrooms to the basement. So what if the cat fell down it (Lyra’s objection). It’s a soft landing!
As so often, it comes back to this: should’ve married an architect.
