School portraits / From a November phone call to the following August
Not Until September
A father with a January posting, a Year 10 son who refused to move, and a school that would take him only at the start of the year.
Simon Harcourt’s posting to Doha started in January, his son Oliver was in Year 10, and Doha College, which was the school everyone in his new office mentioned first, did not take pupils into Year 10 in January. Entry to Years 10 and 12, the published guidance said, was at the start of the academic year only, and there was no entry into Years 11 or 13 at all.
Simon read this on the sofa in Guildford in November and did what fathers do with a rule, which was to look for the gap in it. He rang admissions. A patient registrar confirmed what the page said. Simon explained that Oliver was very able. The registrar said she was sure he was, and that the start of the academic year was August. Simon said Oliver had already begun his GCSE courses. The registrar said that was exactly why. He put the phone down with the feeling of having argued with a calendar.
Oliver, fifteen, had a different position, which was that he was not going to Qatar at all, now or in August, and that his life, his band, and a girl called Harriet were in Surrey. His mother, Clare, who was staying in Guildford until the summer with Oliver and his sister, was quietly pleased that the rule had made the decision for everyone. Simon would go in January. Oliver would finish Year 10 at home. The family would reunite in August like a sensible army.
The assessment was the next surprise. The school did remote assessment for overseas applicants, and so on a Saturday in February Oliver sat a cognitive test at the kitchen table in Guildford, invigilated by his mother and interrupted once by the dog. Simon joined by video from a flat in Doha, where it was warm, and said encouraging things until he was told to keep quiet. Oliver finished, closed the laptop and said it had been “fine, like a quiz”.
Then Simon began sending photographs. Not of the school, which he had been told not to confuse with the experience, but of the Corniche at night, of a lunch, of the flat’s view, of a man selling dates. Oliver did not reply to any of them. Then, in the third week of February, he replied to one. It was the lunch. “What is that.” It was a kind of lamb. Oliver asked whether they had it every day. Simon, sensing an opening and misjudging it, sent a photograph of a swimming pool, and heard nothing for a week.
The offer for Year 10 came in March, for an August start, with the fee schedule attached: three terms of tuition for Years 7 to 11, a capital charge, a registration payment, and a stationery deposit that Clare noted was the only refundable thing on the page. Oliver read it once and asked whether the start date could be moved. Simon said that was the point: it could not. Oliver said that was stupid, and that he had wasted a whole spring in Guildford.
By May he had informed Harriet that long-distance was a thing. In August, at the departure gate, he walked ahead of the family with his bag and his band’s T-shirt and did not look back, and Clare said, to no one, that the rule had made the decision for everyone, and that she wished it had made a different one.