Forty Minutes of Coffee, Three Days at Home

Athens College once served its boarders dinner at twelve minutes past eight. Not eight, not a quarter past: 8.12, in jacket and tie. An old boy remembered this decades later, and it tells you what sort of school two girls decided, one morning in the mid-1980s, to leave for a cup of coffee.

The plan went like this.

Eleven o’clock. A double period of chemistry begins without them. The theory, which is unanswerable at sixteen, is that nobody from school will be in Kifissia at eleven in the morning, because everybody from school is in chemistry.

Shortly after. A bus from near the gate. Kifissia in spring. A café on the square, iron chairs, plane trees, two frappés. For forty minutes they are two people in a film.

The coffee, one of them later admitted, was not even very good. That is the detail that convinces me the story is true. Nobody invents mediocre coffee.

Forty minutes later. They look at the clock and discover two facts at once. Chemistry ends in twenty-five minutes. The bus back does not run at this hour.

Truancy is a round trip, and nobody plans the second half.

Minute one of twenty-five. They run to the main road. Someone they know gives them a lift.

Minute twenty-four. They walk down the school road at the pace of two people with every right to be there. At the bottom stands the deputy director.

He asked where they had been. Kifissia, said the one who could not lie. Why, he asked. Coffee, said the other. They would hear from him, he said, and they did: three days each at home, with a letter.

Then the part I like best. Asked years later for a school memory, the former pupil chose this one, and called the three days fair. She had broken a plain rule at a school that was plain about its rules. She had known it when she got on the bus.

I would like to report that my own children take punishment in this spirit. Last term the middle one received a lunchtime detention for leaving a maths lesson to “check on a noise”, and has since built a legal defence longer than the detention, involving the noise, the lesson, the teacher’s tone and a precedent from Year 4.

My husband, who was a prefect, takes the school’s side. I take the middle one’s side, out of habit and in private.

The deputy director at Athens College got his point across in one sentence. We have been in mediation since September.