School’s Out For Summer
Yesterday’s post (and for those of you with short memories, it was the one about weekends) anticipated some of what I’d intended for this one, especially in some of the comments it spawned. One opined that the beginnings of the six-week school summer holiday, tying-in as they did with the old agricultural calendar that required children to help with the harvest, are irrelevant now that the majority of the population don’t live and die by the rural economy and should therefore be reduced. As far as I can remember, a reduction in the traditional length of that holiday was proposed several years back and may well come to fruition eventually (or do the teachers themselves oppose it?). Not having children myself, I haven’t really paid attention.
Did yesterday’s commentator speak with the voice of someone whose own children have long since fled the nest or someone who’s never sired any? I can sympathise; we’re at the time of the year when the school gates are poised to be locked for the longest period of all. I’ll admit I find it intensely annoying when I’m out and about during the summer holiday period and you can’t get away from the brats. Paedogeddon has left them unable to roam alone out-of-the-way, so parents are obliged to entertain, whether that be clogging-up the motorways en route to a theme park or clogging-up the shops. It’s bad enough when the pavements are buggy-lanes for yummy mummies and their fleet of Mothercare tanks, but when you wander into a supermarket and every aisle is crammed with whiny little Caesars free from the smack that silenced their predecessors, compulsory sterilisation doesn’t seem so Nazi after all.
But then, put yourself back in your pre-pubescent head and remember what you did whilst your parents were at work. You were at work yourself, albeit unpaid. In many respects, attending school is akin to being an intern for eleven or twelve years. Yawning through a religious lecture in assembly, long, tedious lessons in stuffy classrooms bored rigid, the sadistic ritual of the games lesson, dodging the bullies at break, enduring the dinners in your very own Bush-tucker Challenge, and then manoeuvring your way along the obstacle course that takes you back home in the late afternoon. After months of surviving that for five days a week, boy, have you earned the six-week summer holidays!
‘Term time was gone as if it had been wiped out. Real life was beginning again.’ This line from Arthur Ransome’s ‘Swallows and Amazons’ echoes the sense that childhood’s heart doesn’t reside in the playground, and how all the best memories of it emanate from those days when we were free from school. Alice Cooper captured the euphoria of the countdown to the final bell of the term in his 1972 magnum opus and it’s worth recalling that unrestrained joy when questioning the wisdom of the six-week break from it all. The fact that time moves at a more sedate pace during childhood also means that six weeks can often seem more like six months, making the September return to the educational grindstone a child’s extended equivalent of that Monday morning feeling.
Before strict rules were imposed and parents were criminalised for taking their child on holiday during term time, most of the family vacations I recall rarely took place during the six weeks of summer. I always thought that was a good arrangement. The annual holiday happening in the midst of the summer break somehow seemed to shorten it and make me feel as if I’d been robbed of a fortnight. I preferred being at home in the six weeks because everyone was doing their own thing; on holiday, we were forced into doing everything together and the usually miserable experience made me realise that the best way for families to function is to minimise any prolonged time they have to spend in each other’s company. The six weeks should be spent with friends, doing what you want to do when you want to do it. It’s the only window to a world in which you dictate your own day that a child has.
Of course, there are many totems of this period that are now long-gone and to evoke them as somehow being perennials wouldn’t reflect whatever the experience for children today is. The notion of a special sequence of appointment television programmes on BBC1 specifically aimed at the holidaying audience, whether they be dubbed foreign serials (the final episode of which always seemed to air the day you went back to school), repeats of ‘Jackanory’ or that series of ‘Scooby Doo’ with guest-stars on it, are irrelevant in an age in which entire channels aimed at children are transmitting hour-upon-hour, every day, all year round. Similarly, if mum also works, being left in the capable hands of a trusted and responsible neighbour is probably impossible now unless said neighbour has been vetted by social services and has undergone a CRB check. And, naturally, the freedom to replicate the exploratory independence as seen in the pages of Arthur Ransome or Enid Blyton is a no-go today, what with the child-catcher lurking in every bush and behind every tree.
It strikes me that in discussing the subject of the six-week school summer holidays I’m understandably falling back on my own personal experience of it and remembering it as it was 35-40 years ago. Never having relived it through children of my own, I’m rather out-of-touch. I should imagine, however, that having to monitor and chaperone a child for a couple of weeks short of two months is a strain for both the guardian and the guarded. Perhaps the limitations placed upon what were once given freedoms means the parent never has time-off from that particular role and the child is as supervised and restricted as they are when at school. If that is indeed the case, perhaps its removal would be no great loss to the child after all. What a shame.
Petunia Winegum
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July 18, 2015 at 9:16 am -
What a lovely piece Petunia – I particularly like the line about “whiny little Caesars free from the smack that silenced their predecessors”.
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July 18, 2015 at 9:33 am -
Cheers. I suppose there is such a thing as a paedophobe?
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July 18, 2015 at 9:34 am -
Probably!
Yep. Paedophobe: One who has an irrational fear of children
I wouldn’t call your fear of children irrational at all – plain sensible these days.
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July 18, 2015 at 9:43 am -
I think the problem is that the abbreviated ‘paedo’ has become a word in its own right. Whereas nobody would call a Francophile a ‘Franco’, if I were to declare myself a paedophobe I figure it could be very quickly misconstrued!
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July 18, 2015 at 1:21 pm -
Indeed. These days you have to be careful with words and their dumbed-down abbreviations. Wasn’t there a case a few years ago, during a News of the World campaign to “fearlessly name the paedos living in your area” of a completely blameless paediatrician being targeted by the braying mob? (“Well your honour, the first 4 letters matched, so we figured he must be guilty of something…”)
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July 18, 2015 at 9:28 am -
Pet, it might be me you had in mind regarding the school summer holidays and the harvest, I certainly mentioned them in one of my comments yesterday. It feels like you’re able to read my mind on this subject. No, I’m a singleton with no issue., and yes other people’s children drive me up the wall. It looks like you know exactly how I feel whenever the schools are closed for holidays. I dread going to the supermarket at the best of times, but holiday times are much worse for the reasons you describe. Oh, how I wish smacking was still the norm. I used to go to garden centres years ago seeking a bit of peace and quite. In those days gardening was more the preserve of the elderly, but not any more. These days it’s more like going to Alton Towers. This year it started even earlier than usual. I have neighbours who have offspring who live in the USA. They were visiting last week, complete with a brood of noisy grand children, it was like living next to a zoo.
As far as my own recollections of school holidays go, I remember being bored out of my mind after a couple of weeks, and really looked forward to the start of the new school year. My happiest holiday memories are of caravan holidays in Cornwall, Weston-Super-Mare and the Forest of Dean, although if the weather was bad, being cooped up together, tempers quickly frayed – here’s a tip for anyone thinking of doing this, don’t take Monopoly to pass the time on wet days, trust me it isn’t worth the fallout!
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July 18, 2015 at 10:02 am -
I loved going to school, from my very first day at infants to my last day after “A” levels. Only as an adult did I realise it was because it gave me the opportunity to escape my parents, who made any time with them stifling and claustrophobic.
School holidays were just a weird interruption to routine, but during summer holidays my mother (being a bit bonkers/OCDish) insisted if me or my sister went “out to play” in the garden or on the estate, we had to stay out until she called us in for lunch or tea.
That’s when I discovered the joy of books. I escaped everything and escaped into the Hundred Acre Wood, Narnia, middle Earth, strange Asimov/Heinlein planets, Swallows and Amazons, Dr. Dolittle, Greyfriars, the world of Jennings and there were also a series of books about siblings who ended up visiting nearly every country of the world (which I suppose is where I got my first desires to travel).
Everything like this is subjective experience isn’t it? How you were parented, what school itself was like. As for kids, I have none but I enjoy the company of the children of my friends. It also reminds me, after a few hours, that parenting is bloody hard work and I’m glad that I don’t have that responsibility.
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July 18, 2015 at 10:06 am -
July 18, 2015 at 11:16 am -
Was introduced to “The Hobbit” at age ten by Miss Josephine Jones ,a spinster teacher who wrote short stories and had her work produced for “Listen With Mother”.
I believe one story was about a cat called ” Timothy Thomas Tweak”.
I often wonder if it is in a BBC archive somewhere.
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July 18, 2015 at 3:45 pm -
@windsock, how did the books come into your life, if you don’t mind my asking?
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July 18, 2015 at 3:55 pm -
My older sister (by almost eight years) who basically gave me a head start on reading. My first year of infants school, I learnt to read and write properly in the first term. They had a school library and you could take books home. My sister then joined me up to the local library.
By about the age of 7/8, I would go nearly every day during the school holidays and sit reading ANYthing in the reference library and then take home new books with me. The maximum limit was three and I red voraciously. I remember my parents buying me an Enid Blyton adventure story for Christmas when I was about 9 and that was when I started actually collecting books and re-reading them. It was probably the best present they ever gave me.
I think I would be a madder and less imaginative person now (imagine that!) without that experience and its one area where I feel today’s children are – for the majority anyway – missing out.
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July 18, 2015 at 3:59 pm -
“red” = read! Argh – all those years of reading and I still mis-type.
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July 18, 2015 at 11:47 am -
Problem with the “harvest” hypothesis is that compulsory education in Britain arrived a good century after the industrial revolution. Our school hols are short by European standards. Having occasion to look up public transport in Brescia last year, I discovered that by the start of July they were on the “orario feriale non scolastico”.
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July 18, 2015 at 12:22 pm -
I like kids – but I couldn’t eat a whole one…
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July 18, 2015 at 12:36 pm -
Living near a first or lower school is a joy at holiday times- local roads aren’t blocked by parked & double parked people carriers & 4wds, pavements not blocked by same, or immovable groups of parents & buggies. A joy, and local traffic at peak times becomes tolerable too.
And the supermarkets? Easy to avoid the whining, earsplitting squealing, & kids running about like demented ferrets- go early in the morning or late evening. Less of the semi-comatose shoppers too, so no need for knives on the trolley wheels.The downside of the school holidays is that the kids are roaming about free range, the older ones until the early hours. Don’t live near a rec if you want undisturbed sleep in summer. Rain helps.
I’m a parent & grandparent, but I sometimes think Herod had a point-
July 18, 2015 at 3:37 pm -
Here’s my tip – you may not need one for its designated purpose but, during school holidays always take a walking-stick on any retail expeditions. With practice, a deft flick of the stick at ankle-level will bring any ‘demented ferret’ crashing to the ground, or even better into a display, accompanied by your own look of disabled bewilderment as to how this could possibly have happened so close to you.
If we all start doing it, perhaps yummy mummies will then start leaving their precious Tarquins and Arabellas strapped in their summer over-heated Range-Rovers, thus potentially offering a more permanent solution to we sufferers.
(And Herod was a softie social-worker type – I believe he only targeted the first-born – why stop there?)
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July 18, 2015 at 2:03 pm -
A long time ago I came home after a busy day at the coal face to find about 6 or 7 boys around 11 to 15 or so in my driveway during school hols. 3 0r 4 0f them were perched on top of the right hand wall about 15 feet high. I invited them to come off this dangerous perch. The youngest came out with a mouth full of effs, c**ts, bo**ocks etc, in an attempt to shock. I carefully explained the meanings of the words he used. The look on the little monsters face was priceless. The oldest of them was a catalogue seller of domestic items. He pleaded with the tyke to behave himself, as I was a nice lady who bought stuff off him. The tyke thought otherwise, ‘I could scratch your car’. Sure enough a while later the hatch got scratched. Cost me £200 pounds when I handed the leased car in when I retired and a threat to take me to court if I did not pay up. The ‘paedogeddon’ threat keeps the streets rather quiet. E shopping eliminates the hellish supermarket trip. It is hell near the terminus bus stops in town at school out times during term….so you can’t win.
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July 18, 2015 at 3:41 pm -
My first wish is to live far from far from the madding crowd – one day, maybe.
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July 18, 2015 at 3:41 pm -
“I could scratch your car” should have been countered with “I could “
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July 18, 2015 at 3:42 pm -
Drat. My ‘insert any arbitrary act of violence here’ seems to have been rejected!
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