Year 6 is a funny old time. You’re the king of the primary school castle. You finally get to sit on that coveted yet super-uncomfortable bench at the back in assembly, too hip for the floor. Half the girls are now taller than all the boys, one of you is growing a beard - but you still like Toy Day and Golden Time and sticker charts. You’re still allowed to be a kid.
As everyone - everyone - is desperate to warn you: it’ll be over soon. Big School beckons. Here are some SATS tests, to hammer home the message: no more childhood for you.
What better time, then, could there be to send you off for a week away from home crying in a bunkbed between enforced bouts of volleyball?
The Year 6 residential week is a well-established tradition in most UK schools. Five days of wholesome activities, fresh air and self-discovery. Five days away from home and family, probably for the first time. My Year 6 trip was to Pwllheli Butlins, and it did not start well. A seven-hour coach trip was never going to be the highlight, but I still remember with a chill the moment Aled Davies (name altered to protect the guilty) stood up in the seat directly behind mine, whey-faced, and vomited two scrambled eggs down my dove-grey tracksuit. I would like to think that if it happened now, a teacher would have found me a spare t-shirt and a smile to cheer me up. Instead I got two tissues and banishment to the back of the bus “because of the smell”. How character-building.
My low point was swimming...because I couldn’t
Yet there were other perils to come. Who will you share a canoe with? How do you do fencing in NHS glasses without breaking your nose? When you open your chalet door to find a load of feral hissing geese blocking your exit, what do you do? (Arm-flapping and yelps, apparently. But not before they invade and poo all over the carpet.)
My low point was swimming, which made me quake with anticipatory fear all week and which I ran out of in tears, for the crime of not already being to swim.
Here’s the annoying retrospective truth: it was great.
But here’s the annoying retrospective truth: it was great. I was terrified for most of it and it was great. I remember going to RAF St Athan and learning about bird strikes. I remember a bunch of us watching a TV movie about Nadia Comeneci, and having a group cry while eating pickled onion Monster Munch. I remember getting a letter from my mum - my first ever letter from my mum, because she’d never needed to send me one before - and, after accidentally leaving it in the dining hall after breakfast, sprinting desperately back to retrieve it because it was so special and important. I may remember as much of that trip as I do my undergraduate degree.
Later, those memories came in handy, working for a summer at a girl scout camp in Pennsylvania - this time as staff, not kid. Granted, we had bears instead of geese. Sometimes you’d walk into the shower cubicle and find a deer in it.
And granted, a lot of my happiest memories are of eating girl scout cookies after the kids went to sleep, or watching X-Files episodes about scary dark woods before walking back to my tent through some scary dark woods. But I remember holding my own fears and worries from Pwllheli Butlins in my head while I worked there. I remember making sure the kid who was scared of thunderstorms had a buddy for when they happened; that two clashing girls got time to discover that sometimes insecurities come out as anger, or over-confidence, or tears, when really you’re wobbly about all the same things; that the nervy girls got to take the Swim Test last, so everyone else was already in the changing rooms not watching.
A residential trip is a large thing when you’re 11
When it came to writing The Secrets of Sam & Sam, I wanted to acknowledge what a large thing that residential trip is when you’re 11. Year 6 is such a time of change. Here’s this class you’ve grown up with - but there’s so much they don’t know. No one would guess that arty, unassuming Sam is terrified of heights. No one would guess that his twin, gobby confident Sammie, is privately afraid she’s friendless. It’s a surprise to them too. And until you go away from it, you don’t realise how attached to your home and all its unspoken, reassuring rules you really are.
Happily, back in the real world, I was glad to learn from a Year 6 teacher the kind of prep that’s now commonplace for children going away for the first time: whole-class activities that demonstrate that everyone has worries; careful planning for those who have specific needs.
Unless, of course, you cook up a cunning plan to avoid going on your school residential altogether...
Susie Day is the author of The Secrets of Sam & Sam. She also writes the Pea’s Book series and, for older readers, The Twice-Lived Summer of Bluebell Jones and My Invisible Boyfriend. Find out more about Susie at her website. Buy The Secrets of Sam & Sam at the Guardian bookshop.
