Country life
Team spirit
Leanda de Lisle
Back to school — at least for the chil- dren. I feel as if my own school holiday is about to begin. No more French lessons. No more geography projects. I can put away rulers and felt-tips. I can stop reciting lengthy speeches made by French grocers. It will soon be time to forget nurture and focus a little more on nature.
As a rather po-faced article put it in the Telegraph recently, children, especially chil- dren with learning disabilities, need to be kept to the grindstone during the summer. I've done my best to ignore this in the past. I've heard the parent of an old friend com- plain bitterly that their holidays were always ruined by their daughter's shouts and screams about not having enough material on the Holocaust and suchlike. I had no intention of allowing that to happen here. However, with my dyslexic second son taking Common Entrance next year, it seemed sensible to make some effort.
As you might imagine, French is an area of particular difficulty, and even now my questions on the subject are greeted by an expression of panic and terror. We've all been there, but dyslexics find themselves in that dark place more often than most. It is as if various parts of my son's brain are unplugged and a little man has to rush around putting everything into the right socket before answers can be produced. All is well once the moment of confusion has passed. The trouble is it can take time (my son told me that to remember, say, the dates of Queen Victoria's reign, he has to go through the dates of all the monarchs since Henry I) and it sometimes requires help. He won't be getting any of that in an exam.
Still, my son's French really has improved and I feel quite proud of us both. I'm less sure what he has achieved with the geography project, which is a mock for another and quite different geography pro- ject yet to come. I take some comfort in the fact that I won't be the only parent who now knows more about Andover and Stockbridge than they ever wished to. But I also expect all the girls at school will have done beautiful colouring and leave my son feeling very stupid indeed. There is nothing unusual there, of course, and I'm afraid it is a sad fact that boys are growing up with just as peculiar an attitude to the opposite sex as they ever did. My younger ones, who attend a co-ed school, regard girls as the most dreadful goody-goodies and will have nothing to do with them.
My teenage son, who has witnessed the same phenomenon of girls behaving well, likes them, but is also sick and tired of grown-ups banging on about how marvel- lous they are. He told me once that he had never doubted that girls are brilliant in every way, but the never-ending hymn of praise made him wonder if there is sup- posed to be something wrong with boys. To explain what's going on, I told him what it was like to be a girl back in the Seventies: the low expectations that people had for their daughters and so forth. He was abso- lutely staggered. What adults don't see is that most of his generation have no con- cept of women as the weaker sex. On the contrary, all their lives they have been told that they are inferior — and they are as irritated by it as women used to be.
Perhaps it is time that grown-ups grew up and stopped talking in terms of one sex being 'better' than another. We are a team, and, as school doesn't teach you, team spir- it between the sexes is the only one worth having.
Petronella Wyatt is away.
'If you want to know where the buffalo are, give one puff If you want to go on the warpath, give two puffs. For all other inquires, give three puffs . . .
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