Joy Shaverien said this about Boarding School Syndrome. It had a huge effect on me when I read it a couple of months ago:
“Early rupture with home has a lasting influence on attachment patterns. When a child is brought up at home, the family adapts to accommodate it: growing up involves a constant negotiation between parents and children. But an institution cannot rebuild itself around one child. Instead, the child must adapt to the system. Combined with the sudden and repeated loss of parents, siblings, pets and toys, this causes the child to shut itself off from the need for intimacy. This can cause major problems in adulthood: depression, an inability to talk about or understand emotions, the urge to escape from or to destroy intimate relationships. These symptoms mostly affect early boarders: those who start when they are older are less likely to be harmed.”
It resonates with me, makes me connect with something.
I have a diagnosis of Schizophrenia, which does not fit neatly with this description and which, for that matter, I disagree with, but the later descriptions of depression and anxiety, of alcohol abuse and shame and of guilt and an inability to ask for help, to be open about the issues you face; these all connect with me.
I remember so well those conversations before I was sent away. That knowledge that you needed to agree to it; that bit where you are told it is your choice whether you go to away to school or not. But it is not your choice because your well-meaning parents have already decided that it is something that needs to happen and you need to please them. Need, in an embarrassment of memory, to say that it is for the best because you need stability; need a good education, that you want to go away.
And maybe it was. I was talking to my mum the other day and she was talking about how in one year of my childhood we moved house three times. We got talking more and realised we have forgotten some of the places we lived in, in my early childhood. We didn’t have a certain knowledge of all the places we had lived but did know that by the time I left school I had moved about eleven times, been to about eight schools.
I remember so clearly but still in a blurred way, those times when you were in a new house and at a new school. All that confusion of how to get to school, how to get over the friends you have just lost, how to navigate the new school, make friends, learn its particular culture and rules.
Although I am not even on to boarding school yet, I can remember those times. I was so quiet I thought I stopped breathing in class; told my mum proudly I could hold my breath for half an hour and so confused. I didn’t have a clue what a football team was when the class bullies wanted me to say who I preferred: West Ham or Tottenham Hotspur, and not a friend, not a clue where the toilets were or how to make friends, and, as a consequence, not having a chance of making friends when class mates commented about the inevitable smell rising from me at reading group because I did not have the courage to ask for the toilet or the skill to find one.
Every school was different. The last one I went to before boarding school had a completely different way of writing to any school I had ever been to before. It was almost as if I had to learn to write and read from scratch all over again. There was a teacher who smacked you if you were not concentrating; if you got things wrong he thought you shouldn’t have, if you talked to another pupil and yet who had favourites among some of the girls who never ever got into trouble whatever they did.
At that school, I ended up spending my break times in the small alley between the outside toilet block and a brick wall. I would sit on my heels, against the wall near one end and the boy with the hole in his heart, with the blue face, would sit at the far end. We never said anything to each other and none of the other children spoke to us.
Ah! The privileged life of moving from house to house with the RAF! In those days I adored my Dad, was so proud that he was a jet fighter pilot (I still do admire him by the way!) I did not really understand that it was his job that sent us all over the country. Did not understand how in one place I might have lots of friends and in another never get to know another soul my age, except my brother.
So yes; maybe it was for the best that my parents sent me away to school.
But when I look at my partner’s eight year old children today and know that 47 years ago; just a few months older than them I was sent away. I sometimes think, despite my protestations that I had a good childhood, that this was traumatic; was similar, in some ways, to the children sent into care because they had damaged and damaging parents.
That long, long, journey on the train with my mum and the taxi ride to the prep school in Sussex in the middle of the school term. My mum staying to talk to the headmaster while another pupil showed me round. My mum’s promise to say good bye before she left and my frantic, tearful, disbelieving rush round and round the school when I came back to the headmasters office to be told she had gone home. That incomprehension that she would break her promise in that way, only finding out years later that she had run out of money for the taxi and couldn’t stay.
And those confusing nights in the dormitory; feeling so lost and lonely and pathetically grateful that the matrons would tuck us in at first; give us the occasional goodnight kiss.
A double edged sword because it was so easy to say ‘mummy’ or ‘daddy’ when a teacher or another member of staff did something nice to you; to the laughter of the other pupils.
And again a new culture, having to spend my breaks in my dormitory making and remaking my bed because I did not have the skill to do it properly, having to relearn my writing style all over again, having every moment of our day dictated by bells and teachers and matrons.
Because we lived so far away, we did not get to go home on what were called the ‘exeats’ (all those strange new words!) When you could spend your weekend with your parents at home. Instead the small group of us; between eight and twelve of us, would stay behind in a silent and empty school.
We loved that we were put in the smaller, warmer more comfy sick bay, that we were given a rare free treat of sweeties bought by the teacher responsible for us. That we were sometimes taken on a trip to Brighton. That my mum sent me an airfix model on those weekends.
We had so few possessions; a trunk for our school uniform and a tuck box about one and half foot by one foot by one foot with regulations about what it could and could not contain, and more regulations about how much money you could have for the tuck shop and how often you were allowed to go to it.
Coming back to school, at the beginning of term, we used to joke that we were on our way back to Colditz but I still remember how we pooled the pocket money we had, to help one pupil run away, because he was due to be hit with the gym shoe by Mr Scott for some infraction and how this Mr Scott, who loved to talk about his time fighting the fuzzy wuzzys in Africa and was known to take a run up when he hit you and how the wee boy was terrified.
I remember our worry that we had been sent away because our parents did not want us, that their talk of a good education; of not having to make new friends again was really a lie. Because I remembered the boys who had actually been told by their parents that they were there because they were not wanted at home.
And I remember how, as we drew closer to the school drive on the way back at the beginning of term how we would feel that white, white, icy anxiety in our stomachs, how my brother would always ask for the car to stop because he thought he was going to be sick.
And walking away from our mum after the holidays; if she had given us a lift and we hadn’t had to get the train instead; my eyes would be filmed with tears. The buildings and grounds blurry around me but I had to pretend all was ok because there was nothing worse than being visibly upset in front of your mum. You had to make out that you were pleased and excited to be back at school, needed to present the right capable and coping image and later on, at night in the dormitory; you were allowed to be miserable and to say that you were homesick that first night back but woe betide you if you were one of those boys who cried night after night; wet the bed. They soon lost all sympathy and all their friends.
The school I was at was very religious which in some ways was a blessing, a comfort, but also tore at me. I joined the scripture union; prayed that I would be saved, that I could find Jesus in my heart. Wished so much that one day I could speak in tongues, that I would find the ecstasy of finding God. I wanted to be a missionary but feared that I would go to hell because I couldn’t bring God to my heart properly.
I remember how appalled I was when a boy tore a page from his bible, how tears of horror fell down my face and how even saying something like ‘Bloody’ was sacrilegious.
That maybe explains to this day why I can’t swear in front of people and maybe the fact that the music and RE teacher at my next school used to take the youngest and prettiest children into his tent and touch us when we did not want to be touched would explain how, from being a pupil who could embarrass everyone with the loudness with which he sang the hymns. I turned into a convinced atheist in the space of a few weeks. It may even explain why I think I am evil and possessed by the devil.
It is strange remembering that first school, how we were not allowed to watch television but sometimes were allowed to watch films. How one lovely day we were taken to watch my dad on the news but knew it was a rare treat. How we had a plus and minus system for the things we did right and wrong and that when you reached enough minuses (which were bad for your house team) you had to stand for the entire morning break with your arms out horizontally, never lowering them below a certain angle and how at first hearing that, it sounded easy but in reality was awful.
We had a huge concrete tub for washing in communally after games. Thirty naked boys in muddy brown water, littered with blades of crushed grass.
Those times when you had done something wrong and were offered the choice of being hit on the bare bum with a rigid slipper or gym shoe or a cold bath, which at first glance seemed so ,much better but was so, so, so, terribly, skin tremblingly, achingly cold.
And the seemingly fun things; that American teacher who wanted to photograph me all the time as though it was an honour for me; how after an afternoon of having a camera thrust in my face every other moment when playing football; this teacher running after me, stepping in front of me all the time; never giving me the choice. I burst into tears. How we giggled when I said I could escape being tied up and he tied me up and left me attached to the banisters of the main school staircase that we were not allowed up and how I was proud that I could indeed usually escape but later on got weary and a bit fed up of yet another night of being captured and tied up yet again, each time it taking longer and longer to get free of the knots.
Suddenly being called off of the sports field in the middle of a game of football and being told I was about to do my eleven plus because my parents had insisted on it despite none of the other pupils sitting it. Not having a clue what it was about, never having been taught some of the subjects I was being examined in; promptly failing it and only many years later, wondering if the need for that was because, despite our places at school being subsidised, that we were not quite as rich as the other pupils, that maybe my parents were hoping I could go to a local grammar school.
The other later school was far worse. I have many fond memories of my prep school but have nothing but contempt for the public school, where if you were not popular, you would be ostracised. I have a horrific memory of a fellow pupil, whose parents struggled to send him there and yes there was something unpleasant about him and yes he was finally expelled for stealing, but for year after year never having another pupil willing to sit next to you, to have dormitories of children talk about the ‘Shite’ problem which was how he was referred to. To sneer at him, to tease him about his class and his status. His tasks, one year, to prove himself a man which involved a series of humiliations, including having to masturbate in public with a toilet roll among other things.
I went strange there, I was maybe not as bad as most of the other pupils in bullying ‘Shite’ but I never stood up for him; was always terrified I would be bullied in turn and for a brief time got a taste of it, after the teacher with unhealthy desires for me and another pupil lent my fellow pupils the ammunition to call us ‘poofs’ which in those days was a terrible insult. I was lucky, I always refused his invitations to go to his room, but was not able to avoid the tent when away from school but those refusals saved me from some of the worst remarks.
They didn’t save me from being called a wog and a greasy dago because my skin was darker than most other people and my mother called Costa. It was a school where there was not a single pupil from an ethnic minority a school where once the debating team won the motion that public school pupils were innately superior to comprehensive school students, where it was trendy to support the BNP. Where casual viciousness was routine both from students and teachers.
It was a school where a few weeks after my brother joined me a year later and confided in me that he hated it so much that he wanted to run away that I persuaded him to stay, told him the school would catch us (or was it just him, did I even offer to go with him if he left?) I told him that we had no money to travel across the country, that the woods across the valley were too dangerous to go in because a pupil had been killed there once, that the police would take us back and even if we made it home our parents would send us back, so what was the point? Instead I talked about adapting and getting used to what it was like and he stood under that bridge at the far end of the grounds and cried and cried.
I so wish that I had been able to listen to my brother because I am sure my parents would have listened; would have been appalled at how unhappy we were.
And if so, maybe the later things might not have happened; all that messed upness which I carried into my later life or is this just how I am? Am I making mountains out of something normal? Sometimes I think so when I see how friends and acquaintances and colleagues suffered in their own deeply miserable and far more traumatic childhoods.
My dad died recently, very recently. My brother cried at the funeral, the first time I have seen him cry in decades. I have cried surreptitiously and sparsely. Once I had to wipe a brief tear when my mum said “Goodbye my darling” as she cuddled into me in front of the curtain behind which the coffin rested. And once today when I was writing it down. I found the computer screen blurred; needed a sleeve for my eyes, told Wendy I was fine when she said I seemed upset.
There is so much I don’t tell myself, don’t tell Wendy, don’t want to tell anyone. I find it almost impossible to connect how I feel to something that has happened, find the idea of asking for help or just detailing my feelings about a major life event acutely awkward and unpleasant. I have to force myself to speak to Wendy at such times and resist it till the last moment.
I spent so much time trying to prove myself; to succeed in my own weird version of success in this world. I may earn hardly any money but I have won awards, written books, appeared in the media, met Royalty and Government ministers and though I now know it is meaningless, I am still delighted when people are impressed by such things.
I lie awake at night besieged by thoughts. I drink to stop the thoughts. I am terrified of laugher and spontaneity, of that living stuff. I trust almost no one and yet I yearn in a hopeless way for that so much. How wonderful it would be to spend a night relaxed enough and confident enough to laugh and giggle and make jokes, to tickle and mock fight, to do those things I have vague memories I think once sometimes happened.
And I have been blessed by the people I have had in my life. I now know my parents did love me. I now know that people do sometimes genuinely like me. That my new family really do accept and love me, to my complete confusion. That they think I am good and gentle and stable.
I have had a good and active life and had my assumptions challenged again and again. I can lie here in my snoring room and not feel a shred of regret that I never remotely got near to the sort of status we were told we, the crème de la crème, had a right to expect and an obligation to strive for.
But I regret what happened and I am sad that to some people being sent away from home when you don’t understand why, when you are often hungry, not malnourished or starved in any way but definitely hungry and with no way of doing anything about it. The memory of ice on the inside of the windows in winter, of the beds crammed close to each other. Having no privacy day or night; frightened and lonely and lost. Having to do school work on the weekends and evenings and go to church whether you want to or not. Having almost no money, no clothes individual to you, even the casual clothes for your free time selected from an approved list. Few possessions and a circle of vicious people you cannot ever escape from. No bedroom to go home to at the end of the day. No parents for a hug or a grumble to. No friends at home because none of them go your school.
No understanding as to why you are told it is a privilege to experience this and still, to this day, no understanding of the smirks and resentment of your posh accent, those opportunities you were given as a child by boarding school that few other people were lucky enough to experience.
I am sad about that. I feel like a massive fraud. I still feel I should apologise for saying I found that upbringing difficult. That it could have had an effect on my life; its course and its health. I do not in any way blame my parents for this. I used to; but now I can see how they would have struggled to know what to do for the best when every other year they saw us struggling yet again with a new school, a new neighbourhood, a new circle of strangers that may or may not be welcoming, If I had been in a similar situation. If my employer offered me grants to do this, said it was good for us then I too might have been tempted. But I can’t get away from that ever present image of Wendy’s twins crawling over her, adoring her, claiming her, confiding in her, relying on her. Even with all the money in the world I couldn’t in a few months time, send them away, hundreds of miles, to live with strangers in a world that they have no inkling or understanding of.
Adults who were sent away to boarding school from their family homes often learnt both to endure unacceptably brutal interpersonal practices such as humiliation, sexual violation, and bullying and to keep silent about them. When these kinds of trauma emerge in adulthood in the form of stress related disease, inability to sustain meaningful intimate sexual relationships, and mental and emotional breakdowns, adults often don't even know how to begin to acknowledge their long-hidden pain to themselves, let alone talk to someone else (such as their medical practitioner) about their suffering ” (Source: ‘The Making of Them: The British Attitude to Children and the Boarding School System’, Nick Duffell).
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