It all started with an innocent conversation at break time. I casually mentioned that, despite having gone to Paris whenever I felt rich, cultural or simply bored, I’d not yet been to the Louvre.
‘Oh’ says the well-meaning teacher, ‘we’re going next monday. Why don’t you come with us? It’ll be a great way for you to experience it, we’ve got a guided tour, you’ll have a wonderful time. You can be in charge of a group – I’ll give you a small one, easy children, they won’t get lost, it’ll be fun. You don’t work on a monday anyway, so really, what have you got to lose?’
Everyone knows that a speech like that is tempting fate. By mid afternoon on monday, as I was standing in the middle of the Louvre trying to keep forty french kids quiet while the other adults roamed the museum frantically searching for a lost child, I’d learnt the truth about school trips. They are not, and never will be, fun.
I got an inkling of this idea when, at six o clock on a dark, rainy morning, I was trying to get the children onto the bus. Calling for kids who got travel sick to sit near the front of the coach, I felt little Sophia come and take my hand. ‘I get sick a lot’ she said, ‘so can I sit next to you?’ I smiled wanly at her, agreed, and spent the journey playing happy families while chanting ‘please don’t be sick on me, please don’t be sick on me’ over and over in my head like a mantra.
Luckily, the children of école Louise Michel seem to be a pretty resilient bunch, and no one even grumbled as we drove through Paris towards the Louvre, gliding through row after row of Hausseman blocks with the kids squealing in excitement each time they caught a glimpse of the Eiffel Tour. Seeing as it’s one of the tallest buildings in Paris, this happened rather a lot. Still, it didn’t seem to drain their enthusiasm for it, and I nearly got excited to see it myself. Nearly. Then we plunged underground into the Louvre coach park, piled out, and our trip was ready to begin.
Except it wasn’t. With forty children, there is an incredible amount of organisation that needs to happen before anything fun. There are trips to the cloak room (which we managed to do an incredible four times during the day), toilet stops to make, and the obligatory photo in front of the pyramid. There were head counts to take, goûters to give out, and the inevitable confusion over tickets. We got to paris at about half past nine, but it wasn’t until eleven that we started our tour.
I can’t lie. Despite my complaints, the tour was fantastic. The children had been studying Islamic art, so the tour guide told them (and me) all about the origins of Islam, before talking in detail about some of the incredibly beautiful pieces that the museum had. My favourite was a sink that had belonged to a prince, and was covered in silver carvings of scenes of princely life – playing polo, hunting with leopards, and having picnic feasts in paradisiacal gardens. The kids unanimously decided that the coolest thing there was the large case full of intricately decorated swords and daggers. Although I listened to the tour guide’s description of them, I preferred the running commentary that came from Noah, one of the kids, full of scenes where knights jumped out from behind a curtain to stab unsuspecting victims in the throat, and lavishly illustrated with screams, gurgles, gasps, and rivers of blood.
It was after lunch that the nightmare happened. Right at the start of the day, as we walked past the information desk, the teacher in charge had turned to the children and said ‘If anyone gets lost, go to the information desk. Find someone who works here, ask them where it is, go straight there, and stay there. The Louvre is huge, and if you don’t, we might never find you, and you’ll be trapped wandering around the museum for ever and ever’. As the sea of anxious faces turned towards me, I quickly told them it definitely wasn’t going to happen, that they didn’t need to worry, and that I would always make sure that I knew where everyone in my group was. But that afternoon, as we were splitting up into groups, I felt a horrible sinking feeling in my stomach. We’d lost a kid.
I tried calling his name once more, in the hope that he’d been sitting somewhere where I couldn’t see him and he’d suddenly pop out of the shadows. No such luck. I knew he’d been with us just moments before, when we’d gone up the escalators to the second floor, so he couldn’t have gone far. Spinning around, I tried to catch a glimpse of him, but an eight year old child is too hard to spot in a sea of adults. The children were also starting to look worried. Noah, reproachful, turned to me and whispered ‘You promised that this wouldn’t happen’.
Of course, we found him again. He’d gone up the escalator with the rest of us and then, without thinking, turned and gone up the next one. After a stressful twenty minutes, he turned up sheepishly at the information desk and the visit went on. I got the impression that a kid went missing on pretty much every school trip that ever came to the museum. As we went back to the cloakroom for the final time, we came across another lost child, smiled at him, and directed him to the information desk. I’m assuming he got collected, but you never know. Maybe the teacher’s scare story was true, and tribes of lost children haunt the Louvre by night, wandering around the exhibits and stealing food from the cafes in the dark.
I was exhausted by the time we got back. A day of stressing, shouting, and playing endless games of I-spy in which the word always began with an L and was always Lydia was far too much for me. I’ve got an endless amount of admiration for the teachers who do this all the time, and who can’t say no. For me, once was definitely enough.
