Friends made at prep school – and kept for life – are worth paying for

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.