Back at Boarding School, the Red Cups Got Him First

A journalist went back to his old boarding school in 2016 and was ambushed in the dining hall by a red plastic cup.

The school was Birklehof, above Hinterzarten in the Black Forest. He had been a pupil there, and he came back to write about it. He was ready for new buildings, new faces and the usual speech about how much had changed. He had braced himself for change, and what undid him was a red plastic cup.

The cups had not changed. Same red, same stacks, same place. The furniture of your childhood can survive anything, including the twenty-first century, as long as it is cheap enough that nobody thinks to replace it.

The school, being a school, had also prepared some pupils to talk to him. And here the old boy did the one thing an old boy knows how to do. He had sat at that kind of table from the inside, so he knew what a table of well-briefed pupils sounds like. He chose his own table.

I have tried this at an open day and can confirm it does not work for parents.

Two years ago, touring a school in Brussels, I was shown to a table of four exceptionally articulate Year 9s with a folder. I said, with a small conspiratorial smile, that I would just sit over there instead, with the ordinary children. The ordinary children were three boys eating crisps. One of them asked if I was lost. Another asked if I was somebody’s nan. The third offered me a crisp, then took it back when I said I was a prospective parent, on the grounds that I “might not come”.

The articulate Year 9s watched all this from the folder table with something like pity.

The journalist did better, because he had something I did not: he had been one of them. He knew which tables talked and which ones just ate.

What strikes me about the red cups is the unfairness of it. A man can spend decades refusing to be sentimental about a school, and the school does not even need to try. It just leaves the cups out.

We moved house four times in ten years, partly so that nothing in our children’s lives would ever stay the same long enough to ambush them. Last month the eldest came home from a friend’s house, sat down, and said in a strange voice that they had the same IKEA glasses as our flat in Madrid.

He held one for a long time. I bought six more on the way home.