Second Look: Grieving My Boarding School Loneliness
I’m looking back at articles I wrote years ago on Substack to see how I feel retrospectively. This time, it’s "Grieving My Boarding School Loneliness", published in February 2021.
I’ve been watching horror revelations about abuse in the boarding house at a prominent private school in a large regional city in my state. The litany of awfulness is never-ending. Senior boys have been physically assaulting younger kids in the boarding house. Ten senior boarders were sent home last month as the school investigated a ‘punishment ring’ following a complaint from a parent who alleged their child had been hit with a strap.
Further reports say this was a pervasive culture of bullying in at least one of the school's two boarding houses. Police have been involved, and the school has hired an external investigator to conduct a review. Law firms are recruiting former students for class actions.
The behaviour spans decades. One former student has written of how his testicles were smeared with toothpaste and other painful indignities forty years ago.
A student from the 2000s is suing the school now, alleging he and other younger kids were forced to watch porn whilst older kids checked to see if they had hard-ons.
It also turns out a student from the 1970s recently settled through mediation an abuse case against the school.
This is a school where parents pay almost $50,000 yearly to board their students.
With all of this in mind, I’ve recently returned to my article, “Grieving My Boarding School Loneliness," which I wrote four years ago.
I was a boarder on two continents, first in the 1970s at a Victorian-era throwback in England.
“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.”
My 2021 article mainly focused on my time at school in England: the old-worldliness, the masters (aka teachers) who addressed you by your last name, the cruelty of some teachers, and the behaviour of others—one in particular—that, looking back now, makes me wonder if they were grooming us.
Bullying was rife. I’m not sure if the school had a history of ‘fagging’ - younger boys acting as indentured servants to senior students - but the practice was widespread in English public schools for decades.
In the early 1980s, I boarded at one of Australia's most expensive schools, rubbing shoulders with the offspring of politicians and business leaders. The daughter of the then Australian Prime Minister was in my year. You always knew the PM was visiting, and there was a line of large white cars arrayed along the road with a horde of burly gents in dark suits floating around. His visits became more frequent after he lost the Federal election to the opposition party.
The sons of Rupert Murdoch were a few years below me—I never met them in my recollection. Senior school kids didn’t mix with the younger ones in middle school. Rupert himself went to the same school.
My one legacy is a lifetime cigarette smoking habit, which started in the bathrooms on the top floor of the boarding house, lighting ‘durries’ provided by my compatriots’ older brothers. They’d already left school and had cars, an absolute necessity as it was a very long walk to the closest shop. I remember our triumph of inventing a method of soaking cigarettes in port and then letting them dry out—a new flavour. All the makings were carefully hidden under a loose floorboard in our studies.
Corporal punishment was long gone, but bullying was also prevalent. A boarding house is a microcosm, a group of 80 or 100 kids, ranging from young to old, with all the personalities arrayed and testosterone starting to flow as puberty fully kicks in. Privilege and entitlement were unspoken certainties. It’s Lord of the Flies but with meals and laundry provided.
I once nearly had the only physical fight of my life with the son of a prominent Melbourne lawyer and business leader because I’d sided with a visiting school’s debating team and given them the win when asked to be one of the judges. I vaguely remember him advancing on with much anger before he thought better and backed off, luckily because I had zero experience of defending myself against such an attack.
I managed to avoid participating in the annual dick length measurement competition. Or the event that required you to run naked around the perimeter of the nearby girls' boarding house. I was utterly ignorant and naive about the world. I was neither equipped nor qualified to participate in that macho world, so I just withdrew and tried to maintain a small target and be invisible.
The one enormous positive was that I fell into helping backstage on school theatre shows. We even took a small show on the road to a neighbouring town, my first tour. That led to my also working backstage at the theatre on campus at university, which in turn morphed into a career in the arts for many years. I also wrote code on early Apple computers at the school, an early precursor for my long career working in and founding technology and internet businesses. So maybe it wasn’t all bad.
When researching the original article, I came across “Boarding School Syndrome” The psychotherapist who coined the term, Joy Schaverian, likened it to a death in the family. You arrive at a boarding school as a young child and are told this is a wonderful opportunity, yet you are disconnected from all of the anchors in your life: your parents, your friends, your pets, and your home. Homesickness is just something to be expected and tolerated. She calls it a ‘major bereavement’. Bereavements need to be grieved.
Four years ago, I still believed I was grieving. I don’t think anything has changed.