Leavers' Ceremony - 28th June 2007

The Sports Hall was packed last night as the leaving Upper Eighths, together with their parents and their tutors, heard the High Master urge the leavers not to forget their time at school nor to forget to thank their parents for making so much possible during their school years. He finished with a poignant and very apposite reading of C Day Lewis's Walking Away, reproduced below.

Old Pauline and TV Historian Dan Snow (left 1997) emphasised that the dress rehearsal was now over and that the real thing was about to begin. He advised all that working at University was not a bad idea - change course if you have to - to keep up with Pauline friends and, above all, to talk to more girls!

After special presentations to James Soane and Alex Griffiths, each leaver received a certificate from the High Master, a copy of the Year Book, an Old Pauline tie and that most prized possession of all, an Old Pauline laundry bag!

As the boys filed out of the Sports Hall the symbolism of the "empty nest" dawned strongly on the parents left behind ...

Walking Away
It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then like a satellite
Wrenched from the orbit, go drifted away

Behind a scatter of boys, I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into the wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature's give-and-take the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one's irresolute clay.

I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.