Washing the last pleated skirt gave our school years the send-off we needed
In the end – and entirely by accident – it happens bang on schedule. She would have finished her last exam on Thursday, and on Saturday, her uniform goes in the washing machine. The last uniform, the last time.
The first one. It was the smallest skirt in the shop and even at that, one of the women working there had to run some elastic through the waistband, just to make sure it didn’t fall down on the tiny Small Girl. I don’t know how many more I’ve bought in the 20 years since, these pleated wool skirts with the satin lining; multi-coloured tartan for the primary school and blue for the secondary. The Boy had his uniform too, obviously, but all his trousers came from Dunnes Stores and I never gazed wistfully at any of them on the line. But there’s something about girls’ school skirts that roots them in time. A teenage girl can go out at the weekend in her underwear if she so chooses – and apparently, many do – but for as long as there’s a pleated skirt on the washing line, she is still a schoolgirl.
The Small Girl chewed through the cuffs of her first jumper. We’ve gone through loads of those too in this house, navy, grey and then navy again. Some survived to be passed on, but most were consigned to the bin after a couple of years of active service. The skirts rarely enjoyed a second life: my girls are totally different shapes and by the time they were both in secondary, The Youngest towered over her older sister. One went to one of the twins down the road, I remember that, and another went to her cousin. All those skirts, all those girls, all those years.
I hadn’t asked The Youngest to put her uniform out for washing. I was acutely aware that she hadn’t, after that crazy, fearful day in early March when she came home from school believing she wouldn’t be back for two weeks. Even when she realized she would never go back, the uniform didn’t appear in the laundry basket. I thought maybe she imagined there would be a chance to wear it again, or that she was clinging on to it in the absence of closure and graduation ceremonies and Leaving
Cert holidays and Debs balls. But when I finally, tentatively ask for it, there’s no sentiment. She hadn’t put it out for washing, she says, because it’s not dirty; it had been washed the weekend before that dreadful Thursday. But it needs to be washed again now, I tell her, because unlike her, it’s going back to school.
There is nobody left here to pass it on to. The twins are in college, the cousin is awaiting results. The only children left on the road are brand new and tiny, and it will be years before they require blue tartan. So the school will take it back, it says, and donate it to a new girl. I hope she gets a full year out of it.
She brings it with her when she goes to clear out her locker. I offer to go to the school with her – I don’t know why, but I feel I should have some role in this final exercise in housekeeping – but she wants to do this herself. Pupils with surnames beginning with L are invited to get their stuff between 1.30 and 3pm, with social distancing rules applying. It is probably the last time she will ever be in that school, and it’s possibly the last time any of my children will be in any school until they go again, to a new place, with a small hand in theirs.
She is home again in half an hour, carrying my doll and teddy that she was making the subject of her Leaving Cert art project. That’s all she’d left behind on that fateful day. It doesn’t feel like much of a legacy, but she doesn’t feel that it was much of a ritual. She was more emotional, she says, watching the livestream of her graduation Mass while drinking Rosé in the garden with me. I’d thought she might savour this chance to experience some last moments in school, but retrieving her – my – stuff was nothing.
On the day before, she had looked at her school uniform hanging on the clothes line for the final time and suddenly, unprompted, remarked that if she were to put it on now it would feel wrong. Stupid even. And I realise with relief, gratitude and through blinked back tears, that somehow, somewhere, the longed for closure has quietly happened. And we are done with school.