The Last Post
Saturday, July 4th, 2009
The dull toll of the morning bell broke through my sleep with the finesse of a wrecking ball. Headmasters are not supposed to have emotions. Headmasters are not supposed to have weaknesses. Headmasters are supposed to rise from their repose and transform instantly into their professional, scholarly and austere personas. Not this one. This one dragged his unwilling body out of bed by a force of will only marginally stronger than the opposite pull of the warm sheets. Just like every day of the seven years of his headmastership. If only Mr Letchmostly hadn’t run off with Morris Minor all those years ago, life might have been easier.
But as consciousness gradually displaced somnambulism, I remembered that today was not just like every day, and my appetite for it grew. Today was to be Speech Day, and the last day of term: a day of emotion and lasting memories, a day of moment. I could still remember my own last day of school – not, as some of the girls would have it, before the invention of the motor car, but nevertheless a good few decades ago – and the realisation that for all the girls and boys who were leaving us, today’s memories would live with them throughout their lives, even after most of them had lost touch with each other, was touchingly poignant. The Last Day, like the distant wave of a lover left quayside by a parting ship, is the abiding memory which encapsulates all the highs and low, dramas and tears, friendships and fights, romances and adventures of whole years of schooldays. Do our final year pupils leave the school, or, as they each follow the path life has set out for them, does the school leave them?
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