School portraits / From a summer application to an October phone call
Two Uniforms and a Vacancy
A mother from Aberdeen, a Year 3 boy on the BSAK waiting list, and the second school she was told to keep warm just in case.
Fiona Henderson applied to The British School Al Khubairat for her son Callum in June and was placed on a waiting list, which was what the admissions page had said would happen. Fiona had been told, in writing, that offers were made as vacancies arose, and she had never before resented a sentence for being accurate.
The Hendersons were moving from Aberdeen because the oil had moved, and Callum, seven, was going into Year 3 somewhere in Abu Dhabi in September. Her husband, Gordon, took the view that a school with roughly two thousand pupils must have one seat in it. Fiona took the view that the school was not-for-profit, had been on Airport Road since 1980 and was, by the regulator’s October list, one of thirteen Outstanding schools in the emirate, and that all of this was precisely why there was no seat.
So she did what the sensible people in the relocation WhatsApp group told her to do, which was to keep a second school warm. The second school was perfectly good. She toured it on a video call from the kitchen in Aberdeen while a dog barked, accepted a place, and bought the uniform, three polo shirts and a hat. Gordon asked why the hat. She said the heat. Callum put the hat on and announced that he was now at that school, and that it was settled.
It was not settled. Fiona kept the BSAK application alive the way you keep a plant alive in someone else’s house, which is to say by checking it more often than it needed. She emailed admissions once, in August, and was told, kindly, that nothing had changed and she would be contacted if it did. It is a special humiliation to search a two-line email for hidden meaning and find that it means exactly what it says.
Term started. Callum went to the second school in the hat. He came home with a friend called Yousef, a drawing of a camel, and a strong view about the lunch. Fiona unpacked the last boxes in a villa in Al Mushrif that she had chosen, she now admitted to no one, because it was near a school he did not attend. On the school run she drove past the Airport Road campus most mornings and did not look at it, in the way you do not look at an ex.
The vacancy arose on a Tuesday in October, in the sense that someone’s posting ended and a seven-year-old she would never meet went to Houston. Admissions rang. A place in Year 3. Fiona said yes before the woman had finished, then had to ring back to find out what she had said yes to. That evening she told Callum, expecting a parade. He asked whether Yousef was coming. He asked whether the new school had a hat. He asked, with the cold logic of a child who has just found a lunch he likes, why they were doing this.
They did it anyway, because she had queued for it, and because Gordon pointed out that nobody in Aberdeen would understand turning down the Outstanding school for a camel drawing. The first week, Callum wore the other school’s hat to the gate every morning and took it off in the car, as a protest Fiona was not supposed to notice. By the third week the hat was on the hook in the hall, next to the one that fitted, and when she finally put it in a drawer she found she was the one who minded.