School portraits / The summer before a September start
The Lease Before the Campus
A British father who rented a villa near the wrong BISR, a Year 9 daughter allocated to Al Waha, and a map he read one week too late.
Graham Pickering rented a villa in Riyadh in June, near the Diplomatic Quarter, because a colleague’s son did the IB at the British International School Riyadh campus there and the colleague had said that the school was “just up the road”. In July, Graham learned that BISR was seven schools, that his daughter Zara’s year group had been allocated to Al Waha, which had opened only in August 2025, and that Al Waha was in a different part of the city from the road he had just moved up.
Graham had signed a two-year lease on the strength of a sentence that began “the school is in” and did not end with “which campus”. His wife, Ruth, who had asked him twice to confirm which campus, did not say anything, which was worse. Zara, fourteen and bound for Year 9, asked only whether Al Waha had air conditioning. It had 1,764 students and a 50,000 square metre site, said the board report. Zara said that was not what she asked.
The board report was the document Graham should have read in May. It mapped residential compounds against campuses, a diagram of such obvious usefulness that he felt personally insulted by it. He read it now, in the villa, with the air conditioning on and the curtains drawn against a July afternoon that the car thermometer had put at 46. Ruth read it over his shoulder and said nothing again.
He rang the registrar to ask whether Zara could be moved to the Diplomatic Quarter campus. The registrar explained, kindly, that the DQ pathway was the IB Diploma and the International Middle Years Curriculum, and that Zara had applied for GCSEs, which were at Al Waha, and that this was not a matter of distance but of what she would be studying. Graham said he understood. He did not understand. Zara, listening from the sofa, said she understood completely and could she please have the GCSEs, because her cousin in Leeds was doing them and she wanted to complain about the same things.
So the summer became a study in journeys. Graham drove to Al Waha at seven in the morning, when the city was already awake and already hot, and timed it. He drove back at half past three and timed that. He tried a second route past a mall that was, at that hour, a car park with ambitions. Ruth kept a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet had a column headed Lease, and the only entry in it was a number of months, which went down by one every time he looked.
The deposits went in: a seat deposit, refundable, and a resource deposit for the eldest child, which Zara took as a formal recognition of her status. Her brother Sam, seven, asked whether he was the eldest of anything. Graham said he was the eldest of the people who had not yet been allocated a campus, and then wished he had not, because Sam asked which campus he would be at, and Graham had learned in July not to answer that question from memory.
In the last week of August, Zara came down to breakfast, poured cereal and said that she had been reading about the Diploma, and thought that in three years she might rather do the IB after all. “So, DQ,” she said. “The one up the road.” Graham looked at Ruth. Ruth looked at the spreadsheet, found the Lease column, and for the first time that summer, laughed out loud.