From secondary school to nursery: a semi-serious account of a scare amongst nannies and parents

As a matter of personal choice, I am not part of any of our children’s class chat groups. Yesterday morning, around eleven, I received a message from my wife: “You need to pick up the children; there’s a bomb threat at school” (on WhatsApp, it’s just a few words). I set off without asking any questions. I have to cross half the city, passing through north Rome, through the belt of prestigious secondary schools. I catch sight of fleets of Filipino nannies marching like Bersaglieri, permission slips in hand, slaloming between double-parked SUVs. An evacuation within an evacuation. Clearly, this is a big deal. At the traffic lights, I open X; my feed is in a frenzy. The theories are flying thick and fast: it’s a mysterious ‘Egyptian ministry’, it’s Russian hackers, it’s the ‘Fighters of the Masculine State’ – now a classic since the airport chaos and the defrosting of fridges. ‘The strategy of tension is back’, ‘this climate suits the government’, writes someone straight away with a Palestinian flag in their nickname – and off we go back to the 1970s, with the masterminds at Palazzo Chigi, just like with the Pomezia bomb. Could it perhaps be an immediate retaliation for the communist handbook published by Laterza? Who knows. I arrive, double-park, and step out like Bruce Willis in some Die Hard film. For a ‘strategy of tension’, there’s a distinct lack of tension: children celebrating in the street, rucksacks flapping in the wind. 

I slip into the crowd, behind a twelve-year-old girl who is explaining to her friend, “It’s better than a strike, because you know about a strike in advance; this is a surprise,” perhaps immediately picturing a schedule in her mind: a long weekend on Monday, a sit-in on Tuesday, a bomb scare on Wednesday, a meeting on Thursday, and a general strike on Friday in response to the bomb scare. Meanwhile, my wife is asking for updates on WhatsApp (“Have you picked them up yet?”) – she says the class chat groups are going mad, and that as punishment she’ll add me to all of them. I have to pick up two children from two different schools, which are fortunately close by. They’ve been gathered in a small park just opposite. I track down a teacher to try and work out what’s going on. She says there was a phone call, a voice panting heavily, “bomb, bomb…”; from her imitation, he sounds more like a harasser than a terrorist. “It’s been at least ten years since this last happened,” says another, sighing, bored, smoking, as if we lived under bombs every day.

A visibly distraught mother interjects, “But did you know that on 2 November, emails threatening a bomb attack were sent to 279 schools – eight in Rome alone?” I was unaware of this; time is short, as I need to collect my children. My eldest is in Year 2; she will be fine, so I focus on my youngest, who is in his final year of nursery. I spot him in the crowd, sign the register, and go to take him away, but he stops dead in his tracks: “Dad, my jacket!” His jacket’s in the classroom, and we’re not allowed back inside. It is worth noting his display of resolve: when faced with the choice of being blown up or arriving home, in front of his mother, WITHOUT HIS JACKET, my son has no doubts. He slips away, dodges the caretaker, slips into the evacuated building and re-emerges, defying danger, with his jacket. It is remarkable how great a deed one can accomplish when one has one’s mother in mind telling one, Now, remember, you mustn’t take your jacket off in the garden!

Returning to the matter at hand, I simply wish to identify those responsible for this unexpected development. The claim was signed ‘Mikhail Andropov, leader of the Vilayat of Misoginistan’. Andropausa and misogyny. A brilliant election slogan to position oneself to the right of Vannacci. Let us hope that, amid chaotic airports, defrosted refrigerators, evacuated schools and Russian drones in European skies, rearmament may appear less horrifying even to pacifists.