The first time you put your kid in school uniform, there’s an intoxicating charm to the moment. There he is, your precious firstborn, and you’ve dressed him up like a grown-assed man who’s managing the fanciest restaurant on a very large ferry. Slacks and a well-pressed shirt are just the baseline; there’s also insignia on everything – jumpers, shorts, bags, pencil cases and water bottles – and the crest is something egalitarian, such as a tree or a leaf, but whatever it is, only that will do. After a full and overall pretty happy life of not sweating the small stuff, suddenly there’s a person in your house whose every clothing item is absolutely irreplaceable, and that person is four, and has squashed a beetle into it. On that first day, though, all you’re thinking is, “How adorable, this is like his first Christmas, when we dressed him up as a pudding.” The next 12 years, though, are going to be hell.
The first year, you’ll spend the whole time looking for the insignia jumper.
The second year, you’ll just give in and buy five jumpers, 10 shirts, and five pairs of trousers, and a year two trouser pair will remain in circulation until the end of time, waiting to bite you in year 11, when they can’t get those trousers on, and it’s all they have, and they’re on their way to a GCSE.
The third year, you’ll start a campaign at the PTA to get rid of school uniform, but then you’ll have to leave the campaign because you didn’t like any of the other parents and, like any political journey, this will cause you to overshoot.
So it’s now year four, and you’re the world’s most fervent advocate for school uniform, even though the proportions of this swindle have now fully revealed themselves to you: not only is it expensive, it can also be very poor quality and you have tons of it. Every time you get an email from School Uniform Direct, you half want to take them up on their sale offer (6% off, 17th tie free) and half want to report them to the Financial Services Ombudsman.
Year five is pretty quiet and then, in year six, on their last day at primary school, they destroy their uniform by writing all over it with amarker pen and ripping it, and this enrages you, because you wanted to destroy it yourself.
Ah, the seventh year: all the children have now been promoted from the ferry to a golf course, which is to say, they have a blazer, and for precisely one week this looks like an item of clothing, after which time it takes on a mysterious sheen that looks extremely flammable. You just have to hope they don’t start smoking.
In year eight, things will get much easier for you if you took the precaution of only having sons, because the conversations you will have with daughters are just dispiriting. Of course they’re not warm enough, they’re tights. They’re either itchy or they’re not warm enough. That’s what being female is.
The ninth year, they discover self-consciousness. Realistically, they discovered it ages ago, but you chose not to engage and they didn’t push it because they were in their polite era. Now they need shorts underneath their skirts, in case anyone realises they have pants on, and a vest underneath their shirt in case anyone realises they have nipples despite being a boy, and all these garments interact in subtly different ways, despite being identical, sometimes creating enough static to give you a full electric shock if they ever hug you which, praise be, they will not. It turns out the argument, “It’s not that you look dreadful, it’s that box pleats don’t suit anyone,” isn’t the slam dunk you thought.
By year 10, only one pair of trousers exists that are long enough, nobody knows where they came from, they cannot be duplicated, they have to be cherished, and your kid cherishes them by rolling in mud and then sitting on a Capri-Sun. Every day. They would rather be in Squid Game than do PE, because of the joggers, and there’s a lot to fault in the joggers, fashion-wise, but nothing smells as bad as the tops.
Suddenly, it’s the eleventh year, and they’re on their way to their final exam, wearing the last shirt standing, which has a stain on it that looks a lot like blood, nobody knows whose, and their year two trousers as a bandana. Treasure those early years, they say; you’ll miss them when they’ve passed. Trust me, you won’t miss this.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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