Hello Thereshall! Many thanks for updating us about your son’s Eton interview as you promised you would. But first, Congratulations for securing a firm place at your third alternative. Come what may, I’m sure this third alternative will give your son a fantastic education as would Tonbridge and Eton.
But please do not give up hope on Eton yet. You may think your son has had a ‘less-than-perfect interview’ but what you perceive may not necessarily be true. From my angle, what I see is an absolutely honest boy who says he’d miss his mum and his rugby club if he goes to boarding school. Eton is not dead in the head not to realise a young 13-year-old will miss his mother, family, pet, home comfort, local friends and club, etc. when he goes away to boarding school.
The School cannot give him his natural mother when he attends, of course not, but what it can do is to give him an ‘alternative mother’ in the shape of the house Dame. In my opinion, the Eton Dames are an unsung lot who do much fantastic work behind the scenes to get the School to where it is in today’s world standing. In an entirely boys school, besides a few female teachers, the Dames are about the only female species that the boys have regular contact with. The tremendous work they do are often taken for granted, anything from sewing back a lost shirt button, to dispensing out medicines to a boy who’s ill, to give moral support to a boy’s first performance in the concert hall or playing field, to even preparing the flowers (usually representing House colours) to be worn on the boy’s suit lapel on the Fourth of June!
As for rugby, your boy shouldn’t worry about missing his local club because there are enough rugby teams at the School that the only worry that your boy may have is to think of how to clinch a place in the ‘A’ team.
I wonder if your boy has been reading or perhaps viewing too much of the James Bond books/movies for him to be wanting to declare his spy ambitions? 
As you may/may not know, the world’s most famous spy, James Bond, attended Eton. This is of course, fictional. But what is factual is that James Bond’s creator, Ian Flemming was an Old Etonian. And in the modern world of espionage, perhaps one of the most infamous spy, Guy Burgess also attended Eton. So your son’s ambition to be a spy is not without its precedence. . . 