“Congratulations, Simon; we’d like to offer you the Head of Year position.” It took a moment for those words to sink in, a very brief silence before my smile and thank you confirmed my overjoyed acceptance.
I remember that silence well. Only a split-second long, it seemed to last an age, and into it poured all the thoughts of everything that was to come as a hundred and twenty eleven and twelve year-old children were handed into my care during the hours between nine a.m. and three p.m. By sheer coincidence, this cohort included my own daughter, adding an extra dimension to the phrase in loco parentis that is so often applied to teaching and teachers.
With these thought, however, came also the self-questioning reflection that was to become a feature of my working life: Did I just make the right decision there? Have I done right by that boy? How the hell am I going to deal with this issue? and myriad other nagging doubts that emerged in any quiet moment.
It didn’t take long to visit me again during my first assembly with the year group as those children, my children now, stood in neat rows, their young faces looking up at me as I stood in front of the microphone on the stage for my first assembly as their Head of Year, unsure whether it was they or I who was most hesitant and filled with trepidation that day.
From there, it became far subtler and diverse in uncountable different ways: the quiet before a telling-off in my office, the awkward hush amongst a group of friends as I prepared to mediate and paste their fragile friendship back together following an argument, and even the more sombre periods of stillness that seeped into a moment of counsel for a crying student, upset and feeling alone against the entire world.
Quietly, I ran through all of these memories as I stood on that stage again, this time for my final day as their Head of Year, a day that seemed to have arrived suddenly and caught me unawares even though I had known for four years that it would finally come.
I looked across the empty hall at the pictures that now strung its walls as bunting – the childhood pictures of each and every one of my kids sent in by their parents at my request, snapshots which had taken so long into the wee small hours to feed onto the bunting’s string, and which recalled again young, smiling and innocent faces that had appeared at the school gates with bags full of new stationery and hearts fluttering nervously beneath their smart new blazers.
A little over an hour later they filed in for our very last assembly, spotting the photo-bunting, laughing, joking, pointing as they recognised themselves and their closest friends, momentarily stripped of all teenage cynicism and seriousness and beaming in spite of themselves before settling in to listen once more.
We reminisced, we laughed and we shed a few tears until, finally, it was time to say goodbye. That old acquaintance, silence, returned again and settled in amongst the pupils as I looked out at them for my final words: “If I were to want anything from you, it’s not for you to remember me, but for you to forget about me completely.” A few confused glances back and forth, one or two raised eyebrows.
“Sound odd?” I asked. “It’s because I hope that your lives are so full and exciting and fulfilling that they live up to everything you ever dreamed they would be when you were the young children in those pictures.” The quietude around the room held for a short moment, then cracked and finally gave way like a failing dam as a thunderous cheer rolled through the room from wall to wall, carried on a wave of applause for me, for their teachers and, most importantly, for themselves.
Later still, after the party food was all eaten, the shirts all signed and the selfies safely posted onto social media accounts, I watched them as they filed out into the lives that waited for them just beyond the open doors. My first year group.
As I watched them leave I thought not of the past this time, as we had done all morning, but of the future. Their future, of course, but also mine, of those moments yet to be when I might feel most alone, too old and feeble for much else. In such moments when there will only be the slow tick of a clock and when the silence comes to visit me again, I’ll always have those ten dozen wonderful, youthful goodbyes with which I’ll fill it.
