Leaving Home At Eight C4

THERE'S a famous scene in one of Michael Palin's very excellent Ripping Yarns where a pupil by the name of Tomkinson tries to escape a grim boarding school where pupils are shot for disobedience and regularly nailed to the walls for fun.

"I was 17 miles from Greybridge," reports Tomkinson, "when I was caught by the school leopard."

There were no leopards on Leaving Home At Eight which followed four girls as they swapped bedroom for dorm, but the scars may yet be apparent.

"There's no magic cure for homesickness," said Mrs Grey, senior housemistress at Highfield, a prep school in Hampshire. "There's no medicine we can give them. They just have to learn to cope with it." The last time I heard a speech like that was on Tenko.

Certainly what we saw on Leaving Home At Eight was some way removed from Enid Blyton's Mallory Towers where pony-loving 'gals' spent the days on the lacrosse pitch and the hours of darkness shovelling down Battenburg in midnight feasts.

"The trick," said the school nurse, advising her charges how to avoid the yearning for mum, "is to keep yourself really busy and get yourself really tired."

While they were keeping themselves really busy and getting themselves really tired, mum was sat at home 20 miles up the road. "It's difficult," said Sandra on April's first day. "It's going to really crucify me but it's a sacrifice I'm making and I'm hoping that in the future it will prove to be for April's benefit." And of course there is a point to sending a child to boarding school. In later life they're much more likely to become Prime Minister or, if that fails, become embroiled in a drugs scandal in the News Of The World.

But April wasn't fitting in terribly well, desperately missing her mum at a time she most needed a cuddle.

"A child who is homesick will naturally play up to the parent on the telephone," said a housemistress, exhibiting all the sensitivity of sandpaper. "We do try to advise the parent that they need to sit back and trust us."

In a final attempt to settle her, Sandra made the drastic decision not to contact April. From now on she'd only be allowed to talk to her dad. It was "a heartbreaking decision" we were told, "especially as April hasn't been well." Heartbreaking for who?

To be fair, as autumn became winter, and her release date inched forward, April did appear to be getting over her homesickness. Which is all very well so long as she's not now yearning to run away with a circus.

"I'm still in two minds," said Sandra. "I don't want April, when she's 13, 18, or whatever, to turn round and say 'you and daddy sent me off to school too young' and it has a profound effect on her later."

I can't see it having that profound an effect. It'll just be a coincidence she's an escapologist.