Reading about your school is always a terrible idea

Tom Brown’s Schooldays is a depressing book. It’s hard to see why anyone would encourage their child to read it before starting school, particularly Rugby, where the story is set. Tom Brown’s peers stand in the window near the school gates, surveying the town as if they own it. They fight behind the chapel, where the masters cannot see them, and bully and fag, day and night.

Writing in The Spectator in 1956, Richard Usborne, the great scholar of P.G. Wodehouse, cursed the novel for inspiring fear in young boys. A present from his father, he read it shortly before starting prep school and, needless to say, understood why he’d been forced to take up boxing. With time he forgot how terrifying it was and, to his immense embarrassment, gave his own son a copy. Only when he reread it later in life did he come to the conclusion that its influence on teachers, parents, new boarders and writers ‘in all cases has been for the bad’.

Lynn Barber’s early memoirs An Education (which inspired Nick Hornby’s screenplay of the same name) were published some years after I left school, but would no doubt have filled me with a similar sense of dread. At 16, you see, I joined the Lady Eleanor Holles School in Hampton, where Barber found herself surrounded by girls who owned ponies and never asked questions, which she found tolerable only because questions were ‘bourgeois’, and she wanted to be Existentialist, or at least French.

The school she described was dull and conformist, while the boys’ school next door, Hampton Grammar (now the independent Hampton School), was full of ‘little squirts’ who ‘turned into octupuses in the cinema dark, clamping damp tentacles to your breast’.