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Please, Sir, Could We Have a SpotHow to get your kid into a London nursery school.

By Caitlin MacyPosted Thursday, March 15, 2007, at 2:39 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

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When the information—I cannot in good conscience call the flimsy one-pagers "packets"—I'd requested from various preschools began to be pushed through the mail slot of our midterrace Victorian house, I read and reread the registration forms to make sure I hadn't missed a question—any question at all—about my daughter other than her name and date of birth. Where, I wondered, were the blank lines on which my husband and I would be asked to summarize—not to say brag about—our educational backgrounds and professional achievements? What had become of the 10 to 12 essay questions in which we would limn our child's psychological makeup while detailing the subtleties of our parenting techniques and moral outlook? Was there no request for a photo in which we would show ourselves to be achievement-oriented yet laid-back, white but liberal, corduroy-wearing but capable, on occasion, of artistic flair? With no possible way to distinguish ourselves from the crowd, how were we ever going to get Violet into preschool?

What I began to refer to as "ability-blind" admissions is not only a nursery-school phenomenon but continues, in London, even into primary school. While some schools require an assessment—days of observation and testing not unlike the protocol of the New York schools—other schools and indeed some of the best schools pride themselves on being "nonselective"—the official way of putting it—calling attention to the fact in their prospectuses the way American schools forefront their policies of nondiscrimination.

I can only call the emotion I experienced, as it sank in that no nursery-school head was going to hold up any hoops for Violet and my husband and me to jump through, as bereavement. It came as a loss to me—little Miss Self-Made Striver who in 13 years in New York had struggled up from a sixth-floor-walk-up in a tenement building to something like bourgeois respectability—to understand that life lived in London would not come in the form of a series of tests. If not on the merits, how was one to proceed?

One day that fall, I found myself explaining the situation to the wife of one of my husband's colleagues. When I finished my despairing lament, the woman made a curious suggestion: not that I start delivering weekly Jo Malone goody bags to the head of Paint Pots or stage a full orchestration of "Strawberry Fields" outside the preschool of the same name, but that I call up a couple of the places where we had been wait-listed (not in any official way, of course) and … explain the situation. Explain the situation? "Tell them about the move," the woman nonchalantly advised, "and just say you really, really need to get a spot." Er—tell them I really need to get a spot? The idea that the exigencies of one's personal life would count for anything at all in the preschool feeding frenzy was so foreign to me that I hemmed and hawed for weeks about how one would phrase such a presumptive request. Every time I reached for the phone, I was stayed by the image of some clueless Londoner calling the 92^nd Street Y midway through the fall term and saying to the admissions secretary, "Hello, I've just moved here, and the fact is, I could really use a spot in your nursery school."

My ultimate motivation—a classic one for expats, I'm sure—was that of having nothing to lose. I dialed a school at random and spoke at a rapid rate, expecting to be interrupted at any time in the manner of the secretary at All Souls' who, when I'd called the year before in sudden paranoia that we hadn't applied to enough New York schools, cut off my request with a chilling, "Oh, no, no, we're all through with that now." "What a terrible trial for you," said her English counterpart, sounding, unless it was just the inherent succor of English diction, genuinely sympathetic. She promised to put me on her "emergency list"—emergency list?—and suggested that we keep in touch to see if anything materialized for Violet, to whom she referred by name. She then gave me the names and numbers of several other local schools I might try and said, "Come back to me at any time." And so it went. After I spoke to the head of Minors, where Princes William and Harry were sent, I got a handwritten card in the mail saying, "Nothing yet but fingers crossed!" I think that was the moment when I understood what people mean when they talk about the civility of English life.