Some years ago (well, nearly ten if you must know), I gave a dinner to mark my undistinguished half-century. Nothing grand — but a convivial gathering of ten men and ten women in the basement of a restaurant where several of us used to hang out in loon pants in the early 1970s.
Looking down the table, I realised that five out of the ten men had been at preparatory school with me. This was a good feeling but not one that struck me as unusual.
I loved Sunningdale — although when I think about those freezing lavatories, those sagging beds, those terrifyingly stern rebukes from Pauline the matron, those Search the Scriptures lessons that introduced us to the trials of eternity, there were plenty of reasons to hate the place.
Ah, yes, it’s easy to suggest that I made such good mates because friendship was the only bonus on offer in such a bleak environment. But that would be doing the school — and those five men seated around that table — an injustice.
When I arrived at Sunningdale in 1961, a few weeks shy of my eighth birthday, Charlie Sheepshanks was the headmaster (his wife Mary’s memoir, Wild Writing Granny, covering some of this period, comes highly recommended) and the whole notion of ‘modern facilities’ was yet to take hold in the independent sector.
There were a couple of fives courts and a few cricket nets but no art room or tuck shop. A rusty old hut doubled as a theatre when it was deemed necessary to allow parents on the premises — though the idea of one of those ‘meet the teachers’ evenings was unthinkable.
There were only 84 of us and we all rubbed along together, united mainly in our loathing for Ludgrove just down the road. When Mr Sheepshanks retired, the Dawson twins took over, and those of us who were good at football went to the top of the class while non-believers in the beautiful game were left largely to their own devices.
It remained pretty much the same sort of school until only a few years ago, when Tim Dawson’s son, Tom, took over and put up some pretty curtains. This means that whenever I meet a Sunningdalian of whatever vintage it’s like establishing contact with a kindred spirit. We grew up with the same smells in the darkened boot room; negotiated the same creaking staircase up to the dorms; picked conkers from the ground under the same trees in the woods near the chapel. And that’s important.
The young today seem to have close friends but I wonder if, like me, they have friends with whom, if given the choice, they wouldn’t be friends at all.
In fact, at that birthday dinner there were at least two chaps who have become awful bores. And another has got himself in such financial and emotional bother that one should really set up a direct debit in his favour to make sure he eats properly and has a decent roof over his head.
Friends are ‘God’s apology for relations’, observed the writer Hugh Kingsmill, but it’s also the case that we don’t always get to choose our school friends just like we don’t get to select our relations. That has to be positive. It teaches you loyalty and tolerance, and it’s something prep schools in general — boarding, single-sex schools in particular — should be proud of.
It is often chorused that those sent to boarding school from an early age lack ‘street cred’ because they exist in a bubble (normally described disparagingly as a ‘privileged bubble’) but, believe me, you had to have your wits about you living at such close quarters with a cast of characters variously known for their violence, brilliance, stupidity, kindness, whingeing, vulnerability, arrogance, lack of personal hygiene.You learnt how to stay out of trouble or, rather, how to sail close to the proverbial wind if you were to survive without sustaining too psychological damage.
No, there weren’t armed gangs on the playing fields of Sunningdale but when the Dawsons flew off the handle because you’d given away possession in midfield or hoofed the ball forward rather than played it to feet, you knew about it.
‘You are a total disgrace!’ Nick Dawson hissed into my ear while refereeing a game in my last term. This punditry probably put me off my stride at the time — but I think it also gave me a sense of perspective, which, surely, is something worth acquiring in one’s formative years. Indeed, worth paying for.
From the Spectator’s Independent Schools supplement September 2013
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