The boys fidgeted in their oversized black suits, the younger girls wore huge white lacy pom poms in their hair and children of all ages clutched bouquets of flowers for their teachers while their parents looked on proudly.
Ukrainians always celebrate the first day back at school with enthusiasm but the playgruond ceremony of School Number Three in Mariupol early yesterday morning was freighted with even more emotion than usual.
Unlike most of south east Ukraine, where schools are closed for at least another month because of the war, Mariupol is deemed safe for the moment. The playground festivities, marked with balloons, pop songs and a prize-giving, provided a reassuring slice of familiar routine.
However, politics and the threat of a besieging army 20 miles along the coast still loomed over the gathering.
Parents recalled the fight for control of the military base, on the other side of a leafy avenue running behind them, back in April, when the pro-Russian insurgency in east Ukraine first flared into violent life.
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Children have swapped sightings of armed men and military hardware since then and discussed their parents’ evacuation plans.
Between 50 and 80 children were missing yesterday because their families had already fled, Katerina, the school administrator said. “Every day, it’s more and more.” Some have gone to central and west Ukraine; others east to Russia.
Yet the school has grown. The headmistress’ speech to open the new school year included a welcome for the 80 new pupils taken in from the war zone further north.
“The city takes care of you,” Natalia Alexandrovna said. “I think you will be happy in our school family.”
Shakhtar Donetsk football club and Metinvest, the local steel producer, had provided them with school bags and stationery. Both are owned by the country’s richest man, Rinat Akhmetov, who has trod an awkward path between the government forces and the separatists since the spring.
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German, 7, was one of the unscheduled new arrivals, beginning his school career in a strange city to which he moved a week ago. “We’re from Donetsk and we only came here on August 25,” his mother Natalia, a businesswoman, said. “We lived in the centre. There’s military action there. I don’t know how long we’ll be here. It doesn’t depend on me.”
She said that German and her 16 year old daughter “understood why we went” but neither wanted to leave Donetsk. She is also desperate to get home. “I don’t know anyone here. I don’t know what I can do here [for work]. I haven’t thought about it yet.”
How are her children coping? She paused for a long time. “I think they are OK.”
Just after 8am the national anthem played. A blue and yellow Ukrainian flag flew over the school and some of the older pupils waved their own Ukrainian flags. The first years, aged six and seven, had been asked to come to school with blue and yellow ribbons pinned to their chests. Parents said that it was the school’s request-the school said that the parents had thought of it themselves.
Either way not all of them wore the ribbons, an indication of the divided loyalties in the playground and the city at large.
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Olga, a retired construction worker, had brought her granddaughter Yekaterina, 8. She said that if she had to pick a side it would be the rebels: “The DNR [the Donetsk People’s Republic], because our roots are from Russia. We were always together.”
Lena, mother to Yegor, 11 and Timur, 6, said that she didn’t know anyone who “definitely supports the DNR”.
Ivan and Alexander, both 14, agreed that it had been “the strangest school holiday ever” but said that they didn’t envy children in the war zone getting an extra month off. “They will have to work harder to catch up.”
By nine o’clock all the classes had trooped inside to begin the new school year. The first lesson was the same for all of them, the administrator said: “Ukraine is a United Country.”