The Teacher Said Whipped Cream Only. The Class Went Shopping.

A new form teacher in Estonia, one term into the job, agreed to take her fifth-formers on their first class night away. Every new teacher does this eventually. It is the professional equivalent of agreeing to hold someone’s baby and discovering it is three hundred children.

She decided to get ahead of the mischief. As a child at camp she had been on the wrong end of the pillow trick, done with toothpaste, and had smelled of mint for a week. So she told her class in advance: if anyone was going to do the pillow trick, it was to be done with whipped cream and nothing else. Whipped cream washes out.

The mistake, as anyone who has raised children knows, is to assume they already know what you are warning them about. Her fifth-formers had never heard of the pillow trick.

They had now. And a figure of authority had just recommended an ingredient.

She had banned the toothpaste and accidentally put the whipped cream on the shopping list.

The boys in charge of snacks put cans of whipped cream in the basket. When a parent asked what they were for, the answer was honest: the teacher had told them to.

The night passed with volleyball, games in the woods and, as far as the teacher could hear from her cabin, no shaking of cans.

In the morning there was a delegation at her door. A group of boys, hands on hips, like men come to complain about the plumbing. They had tried the whipped cream. It did not even taste good. What they wanted to know was why on earth she had done it when she was young.

They had eaten it. They had assumed the pillow trick was a sort of midnight snack. Explaining the actual pillow trick took her the whole of breakfast.

I recognise the error with painful precision. When the eldest went on his first sleepover, I told him, in the car, not to stay up past midnight eating sweets and watching horror films. He had not been planning to do either. He did both, and when the other mother rang the next day, he explained, accurately, that I had “mentioned it”.

Since then I give no advance warnings of any kind. Before the youngest’s first school trip, I said only: “Have a nice time.”

She came back and asked why I had not told her about the pillow trick. The other girls’ mothers had.