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talk to the headmistress.’ They were all so well adjusted it was almost frightening.
    Then there was the mother I couldn’t bear. She came in like Maria Callas one morning and asked to see all the lavatories. Then she asked to be introduced to all the other children by name, then she took her own frightened offspring out of a car, and with more pomp and ceremony than all the doings in Caernarfon she marched the unfortunate boy into the classroom.
    ‘These are your new friends, Johnny,’ she intoned as you might address the life convicts of Cell Block B. ‘You are going to have a lovely time playing with them all’; she held the traditional handkerchief to her eyes and left under severe emotional strain. The kindergarten teacher said that it took Johnny six months to get over the shock of it all.
    If mothers only realised that going to school is not the severe break for the child as it is for themselves, a great deal of unnecessary trouble could be spared. It is obviously a great milestone for a mother if the only child ceases to be under her feet for the whole day, and is plunged into a new environment for the very first time. But it is only hard for the child if all this tension is built up beforehand. I don’t think it’s a good thing for everyone from Grandmother to the milkman to say how big a day it is for the little darling to be going off to school. The little darling might be tempted to believe that it is. I don’t think it’s wise to make too much fuss about a new school uniform, since the trappings and paraphernalia can become an obsession. A five-year-old is not a good recipient of a long emotional lecture from both mother and father about how much they expect from this giant step.
    What is a good idea for parents is to maintain a steady and informed interest in their children’s work and play during schooldays. This will be a hundred times more valuable than regarding the first day as something like a Royal Command Performance and then forgetting the whole thing for evermore. The happiest children I taught were the ones whose parents knew and cared what the actual school day was like. Not necessarily the busybodies, in fact not at all the busybodies now that I come to think of it. The children would often complain that their parents were fascinated by all their efforts when they were at the stage of making pot hooks, but lost interest once it came to conjugating verbs.
    ‘Well what can we do?’ said one gloomy mother to whom I mentioned this with my sledgehammer tact. ‘Am I to spend the whole day with Teach Yourself Physics propped up on the eye-level grill, so that we can all speak the same jargon?’
    Parents should try to remember their children’s friends, their teachers, their activities. They should listen when the children talk. It is all a matter of sustained interest rather than initial histrionics. I remember sitting behind a child aged about nine and her mother on a bus. The child was talking enthusiastically about Miss O’Connor.
    ‘That’s the maths teacher?’ yawned Mama.
    ‘NO, I told you it’s the history teacher,’ said the child.
    ‘I didn’t know you were doing history,’ said Mother. ‘Will you really need another pair of shoes this term, you’ve had three this year already.’
    I thought it was very depressing, not because we teachers want to be enshrined between pictures of popes and American presidents in every child’s home, but because parents should care.
    There are 20 books to be written on how parents and teachers can do so much for the children by cooperating in spirit as well as in crashingly boring PTA meetings. One of the first steps is to get to know each other. So next week, when you take your four-year-old’s little hot hand and lead him up the steps of his new school, or encourage your 14-year-old to his new senior school, try to get to know the teachers. Forget all that amateur psychology about children reacting to new surroundings and remember all