Arrived by Tractor, Then Took the Same Bus as Everyone

I read this in May, when our eldest’s prom was six weeks off and I had already priced a stretch limousine, a white Range Rover and a horse. Our son’s school is a seven-minute walk from our front door. He planned to walk it.

Every family has this argument, and it is never between the two people you would expect. A mother in Cambridge, writing up her daughter’s 2016 prom at Churchill College, records “suggestions ranging from overpriced limos, to a Scooby Doo van.” Her daughter went in the end in her boyfriend’s aunt’s car. On a GCSE forum, a teenager asking about arrivals made it clear that fancy cars were not the point; one reply reported a rural prom of flash cars and tractors but mostly normal cars, and another said they had simply taken the train. A third pointed out that the outfit is worn all night and the car for a few minutes.

I agreed with all of this in principle and none of it in practice. My husband offered to drive him in the Skoda, with the roof box taken off as a concession. Our son said he would walk. I said nobody walks to a prom. He said three of his friends were walking. I said that was very sad for their mothers.

We settled, after a week of talks, on a compromise that satisfied nobody, which is how you know it was a real compromise. He would arrive in something. I would choose it. It would cost less than the suit.

So at ten to seven on the night, an ice cream van turned into our road playing Greensleeves, and our son, in a hired suit and new shoes, climbed into the passenger seat with an expression I have only otherwise seen at the dentist. The van did the seven-minute walk in eleven minutes, chimes on, stopping twice for children with money.

His friends, who walked, got there first. They were waiting at the gate when he pulled up, and every one of them bought a 99.