The 24 Hour Rule

There were was a cat-fight between two middle-aged women in Beloved Daughter's Posh School Car Park last week.

Not literally, and anyway I exaggerate, in order to catch your attention.  

In actual fact, two Mums shouted at each other, one broke down in tears and called the other a nasty name.

I was sad because I know both of them and they are both nice.  And they were both right, but the environment was not conducive to rational thought or discussion, as we all stood out in the rain and wind, waiting for a summit meeting in which to discuss the school's future.

With around 100 pupils, Beloved Daughter's School achieves places, and often scholarships, for children going to Eton, Harrow and Winchester.  Every year its children win academic, music, art and all-rounder scholarships worth £100,000s to all the best schools in the South West. This year so far 13 pupils have won a total of 16 scholarships and the entire top year group has passed Common Entrance. In the last six months, just some of the highlights include the school winning the national prep school's Rugby 7s at Oundle, winning a national IAPS team trampolining competition in Croydon, best school in all three sections of the Devon and Cornwall athletics championships (both girls and boys), it has winning county players in  hockey and cricket, national diving champions, and it came 6th out of all the schools in the country in the U14s show-jumping in Buckinghamshire, with two of its four team members on their titchy ponies aged just eight.  A truly ridiculous proportion of all pupils end up getting into Oxbridge.  The children are very jolly and high spirited, and the school continues to fire on all cylinders.

Yet, like so many other rural prep schools, its numbers have halved over the past few years, and the governors have told us that we are to merge with the cheaper, less successful, less beautiful school across the river, which isn't geared towards its leavers going on to posh boarding schools. There are simply not enough children in the area to fill up both.

Feelings are running high, and everywhere is rife with rumour and conspiracy.

Every day, what feels like dozens of passionate unsolicited emails arrive in my in-box. Some of the parents are so rich their answer is simply to buy the school outright. Some of what is written is unbelievably vitriolic, personal and rude. If the composers of these emails were divorced, they would have learned the 24 hour rule.  They would have waited for a day, reread what they had written in the heat of the moment, and amended their words accordingly, before pressing the 'send' button, so ensuring their antagonism was not pushed off to every unsuspecting tom, dick and harriet, unasked for.

I am constantly relieved that, for the most part, so far those of my friends who have allowed themselves to become embroiled in the furore, have retained their courtesy and dignity, their communications remaining civilised.  

Being me, I am endlessly tempted to publicly tell the other parents just what I think of them, but I know it would be bad form. 

Anyway, Beloved Daughter is due to leave at the end of next year, so I don't think it's appropriate for us older parents to get involved.