Page 10 of The Rest is History

Elodie

I have a parents’ evening tonight, and for once, I’m not the teacher.

I’m accompanying Olive and Grace to meet Olive’s teachers at Woodland House, her specialist dyslexia centre and the very worthy black hole down which most of my and Grace’s earnings are pouring right now.

I already believe it’s worth every penny, and I’m sure tonight will confirm my expectations. This is Olive’s third term there, and already the Woodland House team is making good on its promise to ‘unlock’ my amazing little niece.

We drop Olive with our parents so Grace and I can have some time with her teachers and her grandparents can get their Olive fix.

They only live a couple of miles away, in Cobham, and they’re hands-on grandparents, picking her up from school a couple of times a week and taking her to her swimming lesson every Saturday morning.

Mum still hasn’t got over her disappointment that Grace chose to downsize when Jake walked out rather than moving in with them. Granted, she would have had far more space at Mum and Dad’s.

And no peace at all.

The thing you need to know about Susan Peach is that despite her having never heard the phrase toxic positivity , the woman is relentless . She believes in mind over matter, in nothing being so grave that a cup of tea or a brisk walk can’t fix it. Likewise, a hot bath or a cold shower.

She had this mindset drilled into her at her Devon boarding school, a seemingly Malory Towers-esque experience many moons ago. God knows, it’s given the woman one hell of a backbone. But she won’t give an inch.

Aside from tending to her sole granddaughter wherever possible, she plays golf and tennis and helps run the local Women’s Institute and still helps at our old school (not Hampton Park, thank fuck).

She’s just the right side of sixty, strong as an ox and always well put together, though she considers excessive makeup ‘common’.

She favours a natural look on her pretty, weathered face.

Over the years, Grace and I have got utterly sick of Mum’s peers telling us what a ‘tower of strength’ she is. Brutal. But true. She’s a bloody marvel. Shocks and setbacks deter her in life no more than a hailstorm would on the tennis court. She’d forge on ahead.

The main problem with our relationship is that she still treats us as if we’re flighty teenagers.

She speaks almost exclusively in italics, annunciating some words with such vigour that her entire face squeezes together and her mouth pinches up.

She still asks me what colour my pee is.

And how many bowel movements I’ve had each day.

I imagine you’re starting to understand why I had to come back.

Because much as I couldn’t leave Grace and Olive alone when Jake walked out, I couldn’t let her come back here.

Having your husband leave you is shitty enough without enforced reversion to living with your parents and having them treat you like a teenager.

‘ Oh, you’re here !’ Mum exclaims as we amble into the kitchen. Freddie, their twelve-year-old Jack Russell, circles us in a frenzy of delight. Like his owner, his advancement in years has in no way diminished his energy or exuberance. ‘How is my gorgeous granddaughter?’

She scoops Olive up in a gigantic hug, squishing Olive’s face against her stomach, and I feel a pang of affection. Relief. We’re all most certainly on the same page when it comes to showering Olive with enough love to make her forget she’s missing a dad.

That’s the strategy, anyway.

‘And what have you got there?’ Mum cries, releasing Olive so she can look down at the half-finished cross-stitch suspended in a round wooden frame.

‘It’s my cross-stitch,’ Olive tells her faintly. ‘It’s a bird of paradise.’

Olive is extremely introverted and relentlessly creative. She immerses herself intensively in new crafts, and this is the year of cross-stitch. She created the pattern herself on squared paper and has followed every last X of it diligently. It’s beautiful.

Although she adores her grandparents, it’s obvious Olive finds Mum’s extreme extroversion and lack of regard for personal space full-on.

Grace and I worry about it, in a low-grade way.

School is doubly draining when you’re both dyslexic and introverted.

It’s important for her to have a reprieve after school hours, but that’s not going to happen at her grandparents’.

Not as long as Mum has her granddaughter to herself for a precious couple of hours.

Grace gathers Olive’s fair, wavy hair in her hands, smoothing it down over her scalp.

She could probably do with a haircut—her waves are erring towards scraggly—but she makes her hair work.

On Olive it looks beachy. On me it would be a mess.

But then, I’m not a nine year-old with the most perfect little heart-shaped face on the planet.

God, I adore this kid. We all do. There’s something about her particular mix of vulnerability and quiet stoicism that breaks our hearts. When all around her, people are losing their heads, Olive just gets the hell on with it.

‘She’s pretty knackered, Mum.’ Grace’s fingertips run through Olive’s hair and her daughter leans into her touch. ‘She could do with some chill-out time. Maybe she can do her cross-stitch in the garden.’

‘ Nonsense! She needs some fresh air and a run-around after being cooped up in a classroom all day.’

Grace opens her mouth, but I touch her arm. It won’t do any good, and Mum’s not wrong. A little exercise is not an awful idea.

Mum turns her attention on me. ‘You’re looking awfully dehydrated, Liddie Loulou. Are you drinking enough water during the day?’

Forget being treated like a teenager. She makes me feel like a small kid. I roll my eyes.

‘I drink water all day long, Mum. I’m just a bit tired.’

At least she hasn’t asked me what colour my pee is today.

Dad appears in the doorframe, holding a dog toy and pinching the bridge of his nose. His permanent air of world-weariness (no surprise, given who he chose to spend his life with) hides a heart of pure gold. The man is an utter softie.

‘How’s my little Olive?’ He opens his arms wide, and Olive slips out from under Grace’s hands and goes to him. He enfolds her in a silent hug. These two, at least, are perfectly paired.

‘I don’t know why I get stressed leaving her there.’ Grace grips the steering wheel aggressively as she drives us the short distance to Woodland House.

‘Because you’re in hyper-alert mode. Because her father pissed off and left you both, and you feel a crushing sense of responsibility to be the parent who shows up for her, and to notice if she’s struggling with abandonment issues on top of everything else she has going on.’

She glances in my direction. ‘Do you think she does?’

‘She’ll have some shit to deal with, that’s for sure.

But she’s doing brilliantly. You both are.

She’s had a big year—Jake leaving, your house move, new school…

I’d say she’s showing incredible amounts of resilience.

And if and when she stumbles, she has a seriously strong group of people around her to help her through it. ’

‘Yeah.’ Grace exhales. ‘You’re right, obviously. I’m sure I’m projecting. It’s like she’s so okay that it seems weird. And because she plays her cards so close to her chest, I worry she’s holding stuff in.’

‘Of course you do. But she seems to be on pretty good form, all things considered. Let’s see what her teachers say.’

Her teachers have a lot to say.

I have an unfortunate, but unavoidable, habit of analysing other teachers through the lens of being a teacher myself. And the Woodland House crew measures up.

These educators may even put me to shame.

I’m distracted by an unwelcome thought about Charlie. I have no idea if he has kids—I’d guess not, though I have no proof despite his seeming hostility to anyone without a graduate-level education—but I wonder what he’d be like as a parent at a parent-teacher conference.

Horrific, I imagine.

Patronising.

Superior.

Unwilling to hear the teachers voice any opinion that differs from his own view of his kids.

Ugh.

Well, I will not be that parent. I mean aunt. Especially not when this team of professionals is jaw-droppingly impressive.

Woodland House’s ethos is simple. Provide children who have special education needs with the tools they need to unlock their ability to grasp the core subjects, while providing a rich curriculum that goes way beyond maths and literacy and allows its pupils to discover their passions and their talents.

This two-pronged attack builds confidence in children who may have been left behind at their previous schools. In many cases, a few years at Woodland House will equip a kid sufficiently that they can attend any secondary school they choose.

We meet with Olive’s art teacher, who waxes lyrical about her insane creative passion and ability.

Olive is an observer of the world around her, and it shows in the inspiration she finds everywhere.

We joke about her current immovable fixation with cross-stitch, but her work across other media dominates the airy art room.

Stunning, intricate line drawings of birds.

Beautifully constructed papier maché masks.

And most encouragingly, some vibrant acrylic paintings that show far more flair and less fastidiousness than we’d expect from our neat, colour-within-the-lines little girl.

But it’s her literacy teachers, Mr Hope and Miss Lytton, who have the most encouraging news for Grace and me.

When Olive arrived at Woodland House at the start of Year Four, she had a biological age of eight years and six months, and a reading age of six years and nine months.

Reading, along with output and working memory, has been one of the areas where she’s struggled the most in the past. In the two terms she’s been here, her reading age has improved by a whole year.

She’s closing the gap with her biological age.

Fast. Grace and I are open-mouthed when we see the stats.

‘She has an incredible vocabulary,’ Miss Lytton tells us.

‘She devours audiobooks,’ Grace says. ‘It costs me a fortune.’

‘We have a massive audiobook library here,’ Mr Hope says.

‘Please take advantage of it as much as you can. And we can tell she’s an avid consumer of books.

It’s not just her vocabulary—her sentence structure is sophisticated for a child her age, and the imagery she comes up with is quite staggering, frankly. ’

When we get back in the car, I can tell Grace has had a burden lifted off her shoulders. Between the learning strategies Olive is acquiring here and her early achievements in touch typing, she’s making leaps and bounds we couldn’t have imagined nine months ago, when she interviewed here.

When I interviewed at Hampton Park.

When I upgraded my London state school salary for that of a substitute teacher at one of the swankiest private schools in the South East.

Because this evening’s conversations have reminded me just how critical it is that Grace and I manage to cobble together that seven grand every term for the next few years.