Grieving My Boarding School Loneliness
There is a particular form of loneliness that emanates from being abandoned by your parents in a strange place, in a building full of strangers and a couple of hundred other little boys.
There is a particular form of loneliness that emanates from being abandoned by your parents in a strange place, in a building full of strangers and a couple of hundred other little boys, in the opposite hemisphere to your adopted home.
I twice endured stints at boarding school, on different sides of the world, completely different yet so much the same. For my first, I attended what today youngsters might call Hogwarts if they saw the buildings, a traditional ‘old school’ English preparatory boarding school in the middle of the English countryside, near a quaint village that’s probably featured in at least one episode of Midsummer Murders. The school is set in 90 acres of estate, leading down to the M45 motorway, lying just beyond is HM Prison Onley, at the time a Young Offenders Prison. The juxtaposition was obvious, and we were reminded of it on occasion by the masters (that’s a fancy name for the teachers) because that’s where we might wind up if we were naughty.
The school was founded around a grand English estate and mansion, built in the 1840s by an army officer whose family money came from the slave trade. After he sold the estate it was repurposed as a school with the first pupils arriving in 1887, 90 years before myself and my younger brother and sister took up residence. It was 1977, I was eleven years old, my siblings two years younger. A year or so after arriving in Darwin from our comfortable middle-class Surrey existence we were shipped off back to the UK, becoming million-milers on Qantas, commuting between the epitome of English private school education and the wild west of tropical northern Australia.
Why this school? Our elder brother was a boarder there in the 1960s while the family was based in west Africa. The school is a known feeder to some of the great English public schools like Rugby, Eton and Repton. Big brother went onto Charterhouse and then Cambridge, the very model of English public school education - and by ‘public’ that means a very expensive private education.
Checking the school’s web site today reveals the fees for a full boarding pupil are £9,000 a term, that’s $AUD64,000 a year. I can only surmise our parents lived on gruel and tinned spaghetti given my Dad was a public servant and our Mum a teacher - and they funded three of us through this school system for almost three years - my sister boarded at the adjacent girls’ school.
Landing at Heathrow we would be picked up by someone from Universal Aunts, perhaps stay a night at their house, then be put on the train to Rugby before being met and transported to school to start a term. On exeats - long weekends - we’d be farmed out to friendly uncles or classmates.
To a great extent, I think we lived in a fantasy world. The tree-lined gardens were known as the ‘wild gardens’, we spent our free time playing in the piles of crackling dry autumn leaves, daring to explore along the furthest fenceline that bordered a laneway leading to a cluster of houses on the estate occupied by staff. We hid in the undergrowth and spied on our biology teacher and his wife and our active prepubescent imaginations ran wild with our slight knowledge of sex and what they might be up to.
The reality was this school represented probably the last vestiges of the English boarding school system - a system decried by many including George Orwell and Roald Dahl in years before our incarceration.
Orwell was a boarder as a young child and many years later wrote an essay entitled ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ about his school years deemed so libellous it couldn’t be published in England until the husband and wife who owned and operated his school passed away.
Orwell describes the education he received as "a preparation for a sort of confidence trick," geared entirely towards maximising his future performance in the admissions exams to leading English public schools such as Eton and Harrow, without any concern for actual knowledge or understanding. He describes the approach as amounting to being cynically 'crammed', as a 'goose is crammed for Christmas'.
We bathed twice a week according to a schedule, sharing the dirty water with the boy before us. Otherwise each morning, a quick face and hand wash in the basin would suffice. In the Midlands the weather is dank and cold, snow lasts on the ground until Easter. Coming from the tropics I was cold to the bone all of the time. I was a fish out of the water, an oddity, neither from money nor class, my only referral a high achieving brother ten years prior, his name embossed in gold on one of the many honour boards in the dining hall. My first name was forgotten because you were only referred to by surname when called on in class or passing a gown-wearing master in the quad.
The uniform was shorts all year round, hail or shine (more the former), unless you were taller than the arbitrary mark on the wooden post in the uniform shop, whereon the privilege of long pants was bestowed.
Cruelty and dispassion ruled. If a boy asked to go to the toilet during a science lesson the teacher would deny the request, then walk around and turn all the taps on. The Latin teacher’s office was weirdly in a glasshouse. Then there was the teacher who regularly asked boys into his study for a glass of cordial and a ‘chat’. Bullying was rife, although I now know we seemed to avoid some of the extreme excesses of other public schools.
An article in the Guardian captures well the ingrained culture of abuse that permeated these schools well into the 20th century.
Savage discipline, along with sexual confusion and formalised bullying, are so common in the schooldays memoirs of the British elite in the 19th and 20th centuries that you have to conclude that parents wanted and paid for their children to experience these things. To most of the class that used them, the private schools were factories that would reliably produce men and women who would run Britain, its politics, business and culture. Boarding school was a proven good investment. So thousands of men and women who had suffered awfully, by their own admission, sent their children off for just the same.
The only attribute I was known for was swimming prowess, not difficult given we’d joined a swimming club and competed regularly in Darwin before being packed off back to the UK. Given I did not become Prime Minister of any country, nor an industrial baron, it seems the investment did not yield a return.
In recent times I’ve reflected a great deal on this period in my life. I’ve previously written about the loneliness of an intercontinental childhood. Co-existing in diametrically opposite cultures, and the impact on a young child exiled halfway around the world from my family.
Psychotherapist Joy Schaverian published an article in the British Journal of Psychotherapy in which she presented case studies in support of a new psychological disorder to be called “Boarding School Syndrome”.
She likens it to a death in the family:
“People grow up not having the language for their emotions. It causes a split between what you’re told you’re supposed to experience and what you’re actually experiencing. You’re actually very sad when you lose your family, your home, your pets, your nanny — everything you’ve ever had for those eight years of your life is suddenly gone. You’re told that it’s called homesickness and ‘you’ll get over it soon’. Actually, this is a major bereavement.”
I think I am still grieving.
Today’s Quote
“The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It's the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.”
Lois Lowry, The Giver
