ETON ON THE F.D.R.(The Talk of the Town)

In Great Britain this week, schoolchildren are off--free to veg in front of the telly or to terrorise their mums and governesses. Then it's back to class ("half term" is the occasion for breaking), with lessons in penmanship and geography straight on into July, while their American counterparts are happily running around the back yard with Super Soakers. "We have horrible summers in England," Lucy Mellors, a London transplant in Manhattan, said the other day. "What would be the point of having the whole summer off for holiday when it rains all the time?"

Mellors is the admissions director, or registrar, for the new British International School of New York, which will open this September in a residential tower overlooking the East River at Twenty-third Street. She was sitting with the school's co-founder, Elizabeth Perelstein, and headmaster, David Morse, in a makeshift office fashioned out of a one-bedroom flat on the tower's fifteenth floor, and explaining that although they would be hewing strictly to the English National Curriculum (maths, I.T., humanities, swimming), the academic calendar would conform to that of Spence or Collegiate, say, instead of Harrow. The flat, befitting such a compromise, was stocked with two sizes of stationery: U.S. Letter and the thinner, taller A4 that is standard in Europe.

"We will be playing cricket, soccer, and rounders, rather than baseball," Morse, who is from Yorkshire, said. For now, the school, with a target enrollment of a hundred, will cover "reception through year three"--that is, pre-kindergarten through second grade. Its prospective pupils include not only British expats but Anglophilic New Yorkers, as well as children from Australia, Singapore, Belgium, Holland, and Japan: all those who prefer Paddington Bear and regimented games to Stuart Little and nap time. Uniforms are to include jumpers and pinafores for girls, and blazers for boys ("But without bronze buttons, which we think are hideous," Mellors said).

A few matters, such as the school song and ...