LIVING WITH PRIVILEGE

LIVING WITH PRIVILEGE

I got involved in a discussion about privilege on twitter a few weeks ago. I have no idea why, it is rare that I express opinions there as I find twitter a cold, ruthless hostile place and have no delight in the emotional posturing and the certainty of opinion I find there. Still there must be something about it as I still scroll through and post my pictures of dogs and flowers and meetings I have been to.

Anyway I had put something up about boarding school and, as far as I remember, was told that going to boarding school, whatever you may think of it, signifies privilege and I sort of get it but at the same time I really don’t. I said I would blog about it and someone liked that comment so here goes!

Most of the people I mix with have never been remotely near a boarding school and have very sketchy ideas about what such places are or were like. When I speak to colleagues and friends, I think they have some vague idea of dark wood panelled rooms and Latin; the occasional servant and lots of rugby and, of course, a guaranteed future of comfort and wealth.

And is that reality? Maybe it is, memory can be a fickle thing! The prep school I went to at the age of nine was like an old mansion. It had a sweeping staircase that was very grand indeed but the children were never allowed to use it.

I remember being asked if I would like to go away to school and, as far as my memory goes, of course I didn’t want to! After all home was where I felt loved; was where my friends were, my toys were, it was where I had a comfy bed in the bedroom I shared with my brother.

Boarding school was something I was frightened of and had little knowledge of. It was a remote place full of strangers a few hundred miles away from all that I was familiar with. But despite that I said yes to going to school. I said yes because my parents obviously wanted me to say yes and I felt I would be causing a great deal of trouble if I said;

“No! I want to stay home with you where everything is safe and familiar, where at last, I have friends and am enjoying myself.”

My parents had excellent motives; they wanted me to get a good education and wanted me to have some stability in my life. At that stage we moved all the time; we lived in different parts of the UK, moving from school to school and friendship group to friendship group. Actually, the friendship bit was less certain… sometimes the friends did not materialise in our new location, sometimes in they did.

My first boarding school was not too bad; very religious but at that time in my life religion became comforting. But at the same time not great. We didn’t have any privacy; we slept in beds crammed next too each other in large dormitories; we spent all our waking moments working or with fellow students and teachers.

All our toys and any precious possessions were contained in small tuck boxes (As they were called) which were about a foot square, you can’t fit much into that!

Despite the assurance that this was for our own good there was always the doubt in my mind about why my parents did not want me at home. This was further exacerbated by some of the boys who knew for certain that their parents wanted rid of them because their parents had told them so. I was less certain.

Every four weeks children were allowed home for the weekend with their family. We (Me and my brother when he joined me there a year later) didn’t go home. It was too far to travel. Instead we would be treated to the comfy beds and smaller spaces of sick bay with the six or seven children who also stayed at school and, on occasion, the teachers left behind on duty would give us all a bag of sweets as a treat but it did feel lonely. When I look at Wendy’s children now, at the same age, I am sure I would have had the same need for love and cuddles and laughter as they do and that a bag of jelly beans from some remote teacher was no replacement for that.

We didn’t have television but about once a month there was a film night we could go to and on rare occasions if any of our parents were on television we were allowed special permission to watch them. We had to write a letter home every Saturday and this was checked by the teachers to see if it was suitable. We had a very limited amount of money we could spend on sweets which I suppose was good for our teeth. And of course the bell, you will remember the school bell at your own schools, but our bell dictated everything. The bell that told us we needed to get out of bed, the bell that said we had five minutes left, the bell that said if we were not our of bed and dressed with the bed made we would get a punishment.

Many weeks could go by, months even, without us seeing anyone other than the teachers and children of the school. We never went to the nearby village or town and if people played sports outside of school it was with other prep schools.

I learnt to climb there and I learnt not to cry and I learnt how bad it was when you called one of the teachers or matrons, ‘Mummy’ or ‘Daddy’ by accident because they had said something nice to you.

There are certain ways of acting in such places and I started off on a bad footing. When I arrived at school my Mum went to see the headmaster and a boy was told to show me round the school. I was promised by my Mum that she would definitely say goodbye before she left but for some reason she went without doing so. I did not believe anyone when they said she had left. I ran round and round the school’s corridors, tears streaming from my eyes refusing to believe she had gone until I was too weary and had to accept the truth. A truth that completely bewildered me.

Just as you learnt to say it is good to be sent away, you also learnt to laugh and grin when you went back to school at the beginning of term. Tears were not acceptable; emotion was not acceptable. You had to be jaunty and though your eyes may have gone blurry with distress, the best thing was to turn away and wave your arm casually so no one could see your upset; you did not give your mum a hug goodbye. My brother was always sick on the drive into the school on those occasions we didn’t travel from home by train; we made a joke of it and said we were returning to Coldiitz, but his distress and having to get out of the car to vomit was real even though he too, said school was necessary.

It wasn’t too bad, punishments were simple – get a certain amount of black marks and you would have to stand in the changing rooms at school breaks time with your arms stretched out parallel to the ground. It sounds easy, but try it yourself, after half an hour it was painful and you trembled with the effort of keeping your arms straight. If you were a bit naughtier you may get beaten with a rigid slipper or a bit worse with a ridged gym shoe. Some of the teachers were good about this and others not so good. There was one that would take a run up to hit you on your bare bum, I remember one of the children trying to get money to run away to help avoid that particular teacher. Sometimes a cold bath was given as an option instead of being hit and, maybe wild swimming is all the rage, but I didn’t like it.

Racism was casual and something we just accepted; we knew nothing else. The house master would give long stories about when he was in the army in Africa killing the ‘Fuzzy Wuzzies’. We would call each other ‘Jewey’ if any of us were mean with gifts or money but despite that there were people of different ethnicities and colours.

This was not the case at my next school, there, everyone was white. The one person of a different ethnicity was Jewish. He lasted two weeks there. You would hear the thunder of people running and he would appear at the head of the corridor being mercilessly chased down by his class mates.

That school was a place of misogyny, class hatred and racism. It was a place of terrible bullying. There was one student I remember who was bullied for all the years he was there. I don’t know what marked him out for it. I think he committed a great faux pas by boasting to his very rich fellow students that his Dad had bought a triumph spitfire. No one ever sat next to him in assembly; people talked about him as a ‘problem’ they did not know what to do with and periodically he would be given humiliating tasks to prove that he was a man. If I had been him, I would have killed myself: year after year after year of being ostracised and bullied, no break from it at home with your parents and siblings, because home is the school there is never a break from the bullying.

In my prep school I had dealt with a teacher who liked to tie me up in the school hallway and leave me there until I could escape the knots he had made in the ropes. At first it was funny but as the days went by and he made more and more complicated bonds it grew frustrating and upsetting. Later he took to taking photographs of me. He would appear at odd moments when I was playing football or something like that and take photos and when this drove me to tears would continue to snap away.

However at the next school there was a teacher who went much further than this and though it wasn’t particularly traumatic for me; I did not like what he did to me. The police are currently preparing a statement from me all these years later to support his prosecution for the abuse he is meant to have committed against other pupils. I will find it strange if I have to travel back to England and court and see him again.

I find it funny when people say we would have lived in luxury: there was ice on the inside of the windows in winter, the beds were crammed against each other, the dormitory floor was bare floorboards, we dressed in bed because it was so cold. We were always hungry, the food we did get was absolutely disgusting. We did the washing up and the setting of the tables and much of the cleaning of the school.

The matron had such a bad reputation that I didn’t go to her for help after hurting my arm so much at rugby on my first day at school that the only way I could manage the pain was by holding it across my body as if it was in a sling for the whole of the first term.

I went a bit strange at that school when I first went there. No one talked to me, everyone already knew each other. There were bewildering words and rules that I did not understand. For a time I spent a lot of my free time on my desk or under it vaguely singing to myself. To cope with the terrible loneliness I would walk in the fields and look at the birds and flowers, but luckily for me, people assumed I went off alone to take drugs and my status improved and they began to accept me a bit more; when I took up smoking and drinking I became pretty much accepted my many of my fellow pupils.

From TV you would think we were interested in learning, that we spent hours in fascinated study. Learning was crammed into us but we hated it. We did only as much work as we could get away with but that wasn’t much; school work carried on in the evenings and on the Saturdays.

My brother’s arrival at the school was similar; he hated it and wanted to run away. I told him that we had no money to get home; that the police would find us and take us back and anyway, even if we did manage to walk across the country our parents would just send us back so all he could do was put up with it. I have always regretted and felt guilty about that.

We played sports outside often and in all conditions but I remember running around the top field in the driving snow as a particularly horrid experience. Your legs turn bright red, your shirt clung to you and you couldn’t stop shivering.

We grew to hate our teachers with a passion, to hate education and to always be on guard for when we might lose favour and be subject to the worst of what teenage boys can do to each other.

Being sent away damaged me. Yes I was in an environment where privilege was obvious but it was a toxic one.

I was routinely called a ‘Greasy Dago’ and a ‘Wog’ because my mother’s surname was Costa and my skin was slightly darker than other children. I was called a ‘Poofter’ because of the teacher who liked me in ways he shouldn’t have and I was called the ‘Morgue’ because I was silent and looked sad all the time. Such nicknames do not help with your self-esteem.

It left me frightened of men and uneasy around girls and women; frightened of men because they were unkind to me. Uneasy around girls because from the age of nine to sixteen I didn’t mix with them or talk to them.

I worried I wasn’t loved and had to painfully work out that public school did not make us superior as they said it did. That we did not deserve everything we got because most people’s parents were rich.

I had to find out how to reject racism, homophobia, sexism which were ingrained in the very fabric of the school.

Despite being very open about my life I still struggle with my emotions and expressing them. Maybe the last thirty eight years of mental illness were not caused by being sent away but it didn’t help.

Yes, of course it does lead to privilege; is maybe the embodiment of privilege. Maybe not in my case; when I left school because my parents could no longer afford the fees the school would not let me camp in their huge grounds on ‘old boys’ days to keep in touch with my former classmates who had been my friends for the last few years. That so called network of privilege definitely exists but I never was a part of it. I never mixed with such people again in my life, as a routine.

I did leave with an education but failed at university because of my mental ill health. I left with a posh accent. It probably helps in some circumstances but is often an obstacle I need to overcome when most of the people I know and work with are from a very, very, different background to mine. I am 58, I earn about £22000 a year, it is not a huge amount; we don’t all have a bedroom in the house, there is always someone sleeping on the sofa bed.

I imagine my fellow pupils did move forward in the world. I imagine many of them are now very rich and very ‘successful’ but at what cost?

When success comes with prejudice and bigotry as a given how does that help a person?

When success comes with characters that are blighted and stunted by the need to hide from and avoid emotion how does that help a person? And how does it help when you learn that bullying and anger and prejudice are an acceptable way forward? What sort of person does that make you?

When the school held debates where your classmates had to argue about the innate superiority of all public schoolboys compared to children educated at comprehensive school then what sort of person did we produce?

I think in those days we created fractured, damaged and damaging people. They may speak with and smell of privilege but I would have far preferred to have grown up in my own home with my own friends, with my own bed and a school which hadn’t driven the need to be successful in everything I ever did into my very young and susceptible head.

So yes to my twitter friends, I grew up in privilege, I never worried that we would be evicted from our house, I didn’t worry about whether I would get presents for Christmas but if privilege implies something to be envied please don’t fall into that trap; just worry that many of our current politicians and leaders experienced much the same and consider how it might cause them to act.

So; If this is privilege, which it is; please keep our children as far as we possibly can from it.

(Photo; plant from my brother’s house, for no particular reason! June 2021)