Tilly’s children now refuse to tell her when another one bites the dust. Recently, they joke, they have been able to see the whites of her eyes when they say that Ludo or Verity has been pulled out of school because his or her parents have been hit by VAT on school fees. When Tilly quizzes them about the parents’ finances, they roll their eyes and tell her to stop being so nosy.
Standing on the steps of the children’s smart prep schools in Kensington, Tilly partakes in the faux-martyrdom of the other mothers about how they all have to tighten their belts now that school fees have rocketed, but she knows they’re not really suffering: they’ve all just come back from Verbier and are about to load their offspring into sleek black Range Rovers. She thinks about what she can do next to save money; she recently cancelled Serena’s saxophone lessons and she had to blink away the tears when she told Rufus that he couldn’t go on the cricket tour to Antigua. He took it very well, poor boy, but £6,000 on top of everything else was just too much.
Tilly’s husband Max has told her that Eton might just be a pipe-dream for Rufus, but she can’t quite bring herself to quash the vision she has of all Rufus’s house photographs lined up in the downstairs loo. Her father and brothers went there – Max went there, for heaven’s sake! She’s looked into scholarships but they’re all mostly vanity prizes. Even being a King’s Scholar won’t get you much relief on fees and the downside is you have to live in a house with the other Collegers, most of whom are Chinese.
When not terrified by the prospect of pulling Serena and Rufus out of their schools, Tilly feels rage: visceral and burning hot. Private school fees have been rising precipitously over the past decade; VAT is just the cherry on top, glacéed with the lacquer of class-envy. Max earns a six-figure salary and every penny goes towards the mortgage and school fees. They don’t eat out any more, skiing at Easter is a distant memory and they could only stretch to a week in Dorset as their summer holiday last year. How is everyone else coughing up the fees? Honestly, the Boomers have no idea how easy they had it. Tilly’s father was a stockbroker and put two boys through Eton and two girls through Downe House and she’s sure there were girls at school with her whose fathers were GPs and solicitors.
Tilly feels quite cross when she thinks that her parents haven’t offered to help with fees. She knows they helped her elder brothers and frankly, it’s about time they downsized from her childhood home. They don’t need an Old Vicarage! Max’s parents are dead and what he got from them he put into their house in Shepherd’s Bush. They’ve discussed moving to a cheaper part of London but then the school run would be truly hellish. Perhaps she should issue her parents an ultimatum: pay up or let your grandchildren become feral.
Over a few glasses of wine, a well-meaning friend suggested that perhaps rural primary schools might be a good bet; she said she knew someone who told her that it’s all maypoles and pretty churches and your children going to school with salt-of-the-earth types. The Darling Buds of May dream is forming in Tilly’s mind but founders when she tries to extend the vision to local comps. Aren’t they where you learn to deal drugs and have teenage pregnancies? And besides, she couldn’t pluck Serena and Rufus out of their schools now; they’re settled there and it’s too early for them to come up against life’s slings and arrows. She remembers girls at her school being whisked away in the middle of the night because of the Lloyd’s Names crisis and wonders occasionally what became of them.
Tilly knows she shouldn’t but she derives a sort of ghoulish pleasure from imagining the anguish of the parents of the ‘recently removed’: the school uniform consigned sadly to the second-hand sale; the late-night whispered conversations about grammar schools and intense tutoring; the brave farewell to the Year 7 parents’ What’s App Group. She has rehearsed it all in her mind because she knows she is just a whisper away from it: the Sword of School Fees tickles the nape of her neck.
The other day, the AA man who helped Tilly with a flat tyre on Shepherd’s Bush Green told her that she was ‘like that Amanda from Amandaland’. Tilly tried to watch it but didn’t find it remotely funny.
Comments