Tripping
Growing up and growing old
My mother tells me that there are new uniform rules at my old school. There’s a problem with the girls rolling up their skirts. Now, at the start of every lesson, every teacher has to announce a mass unrolling. My mum’s a teaching assistant, which means she spends her day darting between classrooms, listening to each new teacher clear their throats and instruct a load of ragtag thirteen-year-olds to adjust their hems to an appropriate length, well aware that the waistbands will be folded up again as soon as the break time bell rings.
She told the anecdote over dinner when me and my boyfriend were visiting at the start of September. We had booked a camping trip in Devon and decided to spend a few days at my parent’s house to break up the drive down. Returning home always makes me think about the strange way time passes. I’m self-centred: I find it unsettling that my hometown carries on without me. It changes in fits and starts. All the shops look the same when I walk down the high street, but then I’ll notice that the pavement is a different colour and it’ll throw me for a loop.
The story about the skirts stuck with me after we had finished dinner. It made me weirdly happy to think of those teenagers doing the same thing me and my friends did more than a decade ago. I spent so much time trying to make my uniform look cool. I shuffled about the school corridors with bunched up layers of skirt jostling under my jumper. One summer, when a craze for tucking in our polo shirts took over us, I used safety pins to shorten my skirt instead. The only safety pins I could find were old, bendy and prone to coming undone, which meant they would fall out in the middle of the day and leave me with a droopy hem.
On our last night at my parent’s house, it was my turn to cook dinner. I headed out to Tesco in the rain. Lemons, pasta, Kit Kats. I’d spent the whole day inside, writing, flat-haired, bare-faced. It was nice to be in the fresh air. I stomped through puddles in my old Doc Martens that I’d bought when I was fourteen, shielded from the downpour by a stupidly big red raincoat.
As I walked by the bus station, I passed two girls in my old school uniform. One had socks under her tights with Mary Jane shoes. The other wore chunky loafers and lots of eyeliner. They look like the kind of girls who wrote poems, made scrapbooks, drew in the margins. They looked cool. I knew that when I smiled at them I looked deranged: my raincoat really was too big. They didn’t know that I was one of them too – cool, kind, uncertain, with an overriding love for impractical shoes – but that version of me now lived under new layers.
The next day, we set off to the campsite. I’ve been camping three times this summer, but only at festivals, which isn’t really camping but instead a chaotic social experiment as to whether rain, heat, or excessive substances will kill you first. I wanted to go properly before the weather turned, as a holiday and as a way to feel free. I was searching for the summer feeling that came so easily to me as a child.
But – I’m not a child anymore. When we got to the campsite, I went to the reception, gave my name, and the man at the counter showed us where we could pitch up. The rain had eased off a little; it was only drizzling now. I put on waterproof trousers and we set up the tent. When I was a kid, my parents would always send me and my brothers off to ‘explore’ as soon as we arrived. It always felt dazzling, to be able to run about a new place and race to be the first person to spot unseen things. As we were putting up the tent in the rain, though, I realised that this was probably just my parents’ attempt to get us to stop annoying them while they argued about poles and groundsheets.
On our first evening, we went to the pub to escape the rain. There was a girl in school uniform, fresh from her first week back, walking laps around the tables with a golden labrador. She was whispering to herself in some game of her own imagining. Across from us there was a teenage girl sitting with two older women – maybe her mother and her aunt. She swigged from a Fanta bottle like it was beer, practising for a life that she saw ahead of her. I drank two pints of cider and beat my boyfriend in a board game.
We spent the rest of the trip as we had planned: swimming, walking, reading. The rain didn’t stop. On the way home, we drove east towards my boyfriend’s parents house. We went past a sign for my hometown and kept on going.
We dropped off the car and caught a train back to London. Squished up on battered seats, I opened a message from a friend: an old colleague of mine had died very suddenly. It wasn’t my loss to grieve, but I still felt an incredible shock. He was 32 and had a boyish face. I’d only ever seen him in an office and now he would stay there forever.
The next day, we went back to our normal routines. I wore a mini skirt and cycled to the library to work. The trip didn’t make me feel like a child again. In fact, it made me feel older than ever.