Send little George 3½ miles to school? Are you mad, Kate?
THE big day is almost dawning! This Thursday, Prince George starts school for the first time. I’m picturing mummy lining up the new Start-rites and satchel, and the excitement of her little soldier’s last few sleeps. One’s baby’s first day at big school is exciting whether you are prince or pauper – a precious, Hallmark moment for us all to treasure.
But as a battle-hardened veteran of the school run, not to mention the endless kiddy parties and sports events to which one has to fetch and ferry, I’m also thinking that Battersea is a far cry from Kensington Palace.
To be precise, it is three-and-ahalf miles away across London’s clotted carriageways. Prince George is four. Are the Cambridges insane? Like everyone else, I assumed their first-born would be toddling off this week to somewhere a hop, skip and a jump from home so his little friends would be on hand for those all-important play dates, weekend activities, carol services, Nativity plays and so on.
His dad went to Wetherby Prep and so did naughty Uncle Harry. The boys in their uniforms there look like crosses between Just William and the Duke of Windsor, it’s highly rated and hyper-local. I thought the tom-toms about Wetherby being the Prince’s first school sounded spot-on.
In their shoes, I’d have gone for it, too, though I might have been tempted by the CofE primary down the road, St Mary Abbots. It was good (and safe) enough for the Camerons’ children, and just think of the fantastic PR for the modernising Royals if they’d decided not to send their kids to private school, thus perpetuating our educational apartheid system… but still. Unlikely. Even in 2017.
And then it was announced that young George was not going to Wetherby or one of the other nearby Poncey Preps. He was going even further than most London cabbies are willing to venture: south of the Thames. According to Google maps, last Friday at 3.30pm, ie before term has even started, it would have taken 36 minutes (‘heavy traffic as usual’, the directions advised) for the weary Prince to return home after his long day in the pottery room or on his tricycle on the rooftop playground of his Battersea school. From Wetherby? Three minutes.
When George’s educational bombshell dropped, I happened to be at a tea party, and a current mother with offspring at the Battersea school, Thomas’s, was present (talk about being in the right place at the right time, eh).
YOU’D think she would have been exercising early bragging rights – after all, no less than the Duke and Duchess of C had just validated her own choice as a parent. But no. She didn’t seem that happy about the Royal invasion of Nappy Valley (as Battersea has long been called by estate agents trying to flog houses there to young parents minus palaces of their own to call home.)
‘The thing is,’ she was moaning, ‘it’s a great school, and I can understand why they’ve chosen it, but it’ll be like when Hugh Grant became a parent. The other mothers can’t help acting all weird and artificial around him, and when Prince George starts,’ she ended dramatically, ‘things will never be the same again!’
Me, I can’t get past the sheer inconvenience of the arrangement – not just for the Royal pupil and parents, but for everyone.
Unless the cops clear the roads twice daily and whoosh our wee laddie in a blue-flashing-light convoy of cars and outriders, he will spend well over an hour in traffic every day.
Should other ‘road-users’ really be delayed on their own business by a special Prince William Lane, all to get a four-year-old, albeit a very special one, to ‘circle time?’
I note that according to the headmaster, Ben Thomas, the first rule of the school is ‘be kind’.
That is indeed a very good rule for a school. But take it from this veteran of the dreaded school run.
The first rule for a parent when it comes to a school is ‘be near’.