School portraits / One Year 6 to Year 7 summer, Umm Suqeim to Al Barsha
The Little School
A Nigerian-British father, a daughter leaving Year 6, and the discovery that his primary school was exactly that.
Femi Adeyemi chose Kings’ School Dubai for the view. He will deny this, and he will cite the Outstanding rating and the pool and a leaflet, but the truth is that he stood on Al Yazzi Street in Umm Suqeim with the Burj Al Arab doing its sail impression behind the school and thought, my daughter will go here, in the way men think about cars. Tolu was four. The school went up to Year 6. Femi was aware of this the way he was aware that his mortgage had an end date.
The awareness arrived properly at a Year 5 parents’ evening, when Tolu’s teacher said “and of course next year you’ll be thinking about the move,” and Femi said “what move,” and his wife Adaeze, who had been thinking about the move since Reception, put a hand on his knee that meant do not say anything else. He had chosen a school by the sea and not noticed that it stopped at eleven.
The move, it turned out, had a name: Kings’ Al Barsha, the group’s all-through campus and the secondary pathway for Kings’ Dubai pupils, which Femi now drove to on a Saturday to look at as though it had been hiding. It had not been hiding. It had been in Al Barsha since 2014, with a sixth form and a fee schedule that Adaeze had printed in February. Femi read the Year 13 number in the car park and made a sound she later described as “a tyre going down.”
Tolu, meanwhile, had decided she was not going. She was eleven and had opinions about loyalty. Umm Suqeim had the pool she had learnt in, the running track she had been sick on in Year 3, and a best friend called Maryam whose family were also moving to Al Barsha, a fact Tolu treated as irrelevant to the principle. Femi explained that the school ended, that it simply did not have a Year 7, that nobody was choosing this. Tolu said that was a design flaw.
Then there was the younger one. Dayo was in Year 2 and going nowhere, so from September the Adeyemis would have one child in Umm Suqeim and one in Al Barsha, which is a twenty-minute drive that becomes forty-five at school-run time and a marriage at pick-up. Adaeze found the paid shuttle between the two campuses in the review and read the paragraph aloud twice, once for information and once for pleasure. Femi asked about departure times and supervision, the way the guides tell you to, and then asked a third question, which was whether a parent could ride it.
August came. Tolu went to Al Barsha in a uniform that was recognisably the same uniform and recognisably not, and Femi waited for the collapse. It did not come. By the second week she was on the shuttle on Thursdays to meet her brother, by the third she had a form tutor she quoted at dinner, and by October she had a house, a locker, and a view on the Year 9 boys that her father did not ask to hear.
The sentence that finished him came in November. Dayo had a swimming gala at Umm Suqeim, and the whole family went, and on the walk in from Al Yazzi Street, with the Burj Al Arab still doing its impression, Tolu looked at the gates she had cried about in June and said, kindly, as if introducing him, “Oh, this is the little school.”