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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 2)

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I did keep in touch—I was soon on a first-name basis with half a dozen of the nursery heads or their assistants, all of whom maintained that I ought not to worry. "Everyone gets a place eventually" was repeated to me so many times that I felt I ought to put it on a bumper sticker to spread the Good News. The persistence—or else the picture of pathos—finally paid off. In December I got the call. A Montessori school that was supposed to be good had a chance opening: Violet could start in January. My joy and relief were coupled with a feeling of suspicion: What the hell were they thinking letting us in without knowing the first thing about our child? What if she turned out to be some violent, pre-verbal playground bully? And by extension, what if that's what all of the other kids were like? (In fact, about halfway through the winter term, my daughter had her first experience with a classmate who had probably benefited greatly from no one's ever having met him until he showed up at school. The little boy in question was shoving children and knocking them over intentionally; my daughter had twice been the target of his rage and had been pushed off a climbing apparatus in the park one day. Even to look at the boy, whose face was angry and withdrawn, was to know, as I tearfully railed to my husband, "He would never have been let in to Beginnings!" The New Yorker in me bristled with the injustice of it. The second time it happened, I made an appointment to talk to the head, practically litigious in my outrage. I could feel myself starting to shift in my seat, though, when, after describing how the teachers were going to protect the other children—the boy was not going to go to the park any more, for instance—Sophia [pronounced Soph-EYE-a, with a long 'I'] told me, "This poor little boy has just had such an unhappy life so far." Was there anything else I wanted to discuss? Why, I wondered, slinking away red-faced to my car, did so many encounters in English living seem to go from "I oughta sue!" to "So sorry to bother you" in five minutes or less?)

But back to the sweet moment of triumph: The hard work over, I now awaited the mother lode of mail that would accompany our admission to Ladbroke Square Montessori School—the welcome letter from Sophia, the save-the-date for the charity auction, the invitation to the new parents' light-picnic-supper-cum-disco-rave blowout. Nothing came. I checked the mail every day with something like paranoia. Had I dreamed up the offer of a spot? Did I have the starting date correct? What were the rules concerning clothes, conduct, nut allergies? "I know what you mean," said Emily, when I called for an expat sanity check, baffled by the lack of communication. "In America they would have five picnics. But the English are a bit more relaxed about things."

The week before school was to start, I caved and called the office. I'd whittled my barrage of questions down to two. "What exactly is your policy on toilet training?" I inquired, somewhat confrontationally, of the unsuspecting teacher who happened to answer the phone. (Still fresh in my mind was the Manichean divide among the Manhattan schools, with some parents decrying Jack and Jill because of their dogmatic stance on bladder control and other parents putting it at the top of their list for the same reason.) At this point, Violet pretty much had it down, but I was a little worried about accidents in the new setting. The teacher thought for a minute and then said, as if she was just forming an opinion on the phone, "Well, I suppose it would be good if she could mostly manage by herself." It took me a moment to regroup. "And how," I went on, a little more quietly, but still determinedly, "do you handle the separation process?" "She's a bit cautious, is she?" the teacher inferred. I explained that the disruption of the move from the states had indeed left Violet on the clingy side. "Do you want to stick around for a day or two till she settles?" "Umm … OK," I mumbled, "Thanks."

It's a truism that when New Yorkers go to Los Angeles, they drive around confusedly looking for some recognizable heart of the city—a Midtown or Central Park—only to find that there is no there there. At the beginning, in sprawling, idiosyncratically laid-out London, I did miss the numbered streets of the Manhattan grid system. But what I foundered on was the lack of system itself—of readable rules and transparent protocol, of posted procedures that one could internalize and conquer. There is, you might say, no "how" here. No policy, no process—denied the comforting ease of functioning within either, I have often been left, as I was when my daughter started nursery school, with the curiously humbling experience of being treated as a person.

One morning, a few weeks in to the winter term, I was waiting outside the school with Violet. A woman came bicycling down the street and stopped outside the blue door. There was something about the awkward way she handled her bicycle, humping it over the sidewalk, not quite knowing how—or where—to park it, that gave her away as an American. (New Yorkers tend to arrive in London, see it as a more bikeable city, invest in a top-of-the-line hybrid, and, after almost killing themselves on the first miniroundabout, consign the thing to the coal cellar until their "Moving Back to the States" sale three years' hence.) The woman buzzed, and I overheard her unhappy request for a meeting to discuss her daughter's application. Gently rebuffed—told to call later in the day and speak to the secretary—she cast a baleful glance in our direction. "Good luck," I said, thinking maybe she'd take heart from my American accent. "But what exactly am I supposed to do?" the woman demanded. At this point, Violet began to tug at my hand because the door had been opened and we could go in. "Don't worry," I said to the woman, as I passed on the only truth I knew: "Everyone gets a spot eventually."