Charles, Earl Spencer published a blistering denunciation of his prep school days – complete with constant corporal punishment and child abuse – in A Very Private School last month. Since then, many of us who attended such places have been recalling our own time there too, nodding in recognition or giving thanks that our experience was better.
From 1978 to 1983, I was at such a boarding school myself, in Suffolk. Presumably prep schools have changed a lot since then, but in the late 70s they were still brutal, spartan places. You wore shorts in all weathers, studied and slept with the windows open, and spent your life longing for an extra blanket or a few special minutes by the radiator. Teachers, who called you only by your surname, were allowed to beat, pull hair and torment at will.
Our parents would have been powerless to do anything about it, and perhaps incapable even of voicing a protest
Sleeping on prison-style beds with U-shaped horsehair mattresses, we shared a dormitory with up to a dozen, often feral, fellow pupils, whose snores, farts and other nocturnal emissions tortured our sleep. Homesickness, worst after breakfast, never went away, and car-rides back to this place at the beginning of term – that dagger in the entrails as you saw the school gates – must rank among many people’s most awkward memories. ‘A friend of ours used to have to be heavily sedated in order to go back to school,’ one old boy laughs uncomfortably in The Making of Them, the 1994 BBC documentary about the prep school system. ‘Perfectly normal chap now… I don’t know what upset him about the place.’
My own school (which here I’ll call ‘Bulmer Hall’) I also hated. It was presided over by a married couple (Dick and Wendy will do as names for them) and for two-thirds of the year they were our substitute parents. Dick was a learned, unworldly, mild-mannered man – his father had run the school with more elan before him, they said – and was, I’m pretty sure, as wary of his wife as we were. Wendy, quick to rage, distressingly unpredictable, terrified all of us. As a fussy eater I was number one on her radar.
Prep school food back then was a trial. There were ‘boiled eggs’, almost completely unboiled, whose warm liquid contents you were expected to slop down greedily, sardines on toast with dislodged fisheyes squinting up at you, mutton hotpot with odd-looking lumps of white rubbery stuff swimming about in its depths. Should you refuse to choke down any of these, Wendy, having tasered you with dark looks and slashing words, would cancel your pudding and make you stay in the dining room, over cold, solidifying mashed potato – I gag as I write these words – long after the other pupils had gone off to reading hour or games. Occasionally, in a quaint touch, she’d put a mahogany dressing mirror in front of you on the table: ‘So you can see how stupid you look.’ This was a detail, one novelist told me, he could never use in fiction, as no one would believe it.
No doubt safeguarding these days means prep school teachers are vetted like MI6 applicants, but in the late seventies the staffrooms were still dumping grounds for a whole host of misfits and social rejects. You were shepherded by adults who did not love you and sometimes seemed actively to hate you, perhaps to hate all children. Certainly, there were inspirational teachers I will remember all my life and who, with their learning, kindness and natural authority gave me some conception of what an adult could and should be. But there were also alcoholics, sadists, the twisted, lonely and plain odd.
Some teachers were known not to beat, others to beat ferociously, often with whatever came to hand. One Dickensian flagellator we’ll call Mr. Raymond (he went on to become headmaster elsewhere) was known for his tendency, if catching two or three pupils talking after lights out, to wake up the entire dormitory and thrash the boys in a line. We knew little of sexuality back then, still less of its perversions, but the sinister sight of some teachers beating wherever, whenever and whoever they could – and as hard as they dared – lodged worryingly deep in one’s psyche.
Our parents, if told, would have been powerless to do anything about it, and perhaps incapable even of voicing a protest. Sending your child to boarding school, making the necessary sacrifices, was a mark of virtue, a way of proving yourself a good parent. Besides, many had been to such schools themselves and bought into that system of values so acutely that, just like us, they were effectively in thrall to it.
Naturally, there was a school bully, a burly farmer’s son who, when not organising public stoning sessions with pencil rubbers, would insist every child in his dormitory be branded with a bruising slipper mark, administered by him personally, and with periodic booster-thrashings when the scar started to heal. We flinched and toadied in his presence, but he was far from alone.
Everyone was, at times, everyone else’s tormentor, even if our bullying of each other was less committed than the farmer’s boy’s (for whom it was vocational). Often it was just to discover what it felt like, for a while, to be subject rather than object. Orwell called his own prep school ‘a world of force and fraud and secrecy’ – this is a good, if one-sided, description. Boredom and frustration sent us out looking for victims: every so often one older boy, known for possessing a variety of fen and gin traps, would catch a rat in a baited cage, and we’d race down to the water-butts to see him drown the poor animal. If one were looking for a clunking metaphor, there it was.
But would that metaphor have summed up the prep school experience entirely? I have friends, fellow old boys, who describe their time at the same school as ‘idyllic’. Whether they’re misremembering, or were simply designed for the experience in a way I was not, is a moot point.
Certainly, there were magical moments at this school, enhanced, not undermined, by the severity of the environment, which later became symbols of things to pursue in life. The camaraderie of school plays or choir practice (one of the few ways non-sporty boys could shine), an early morning swim, the way the change of seasons registered so crucially (and with such smells) in a place where you were forced to play outdoor sports at least three days a week. Some of the teachers – usually the gruffer ones – were hypnotically good with boys, and often belligerently funny, with a savage, joshing humour (think Blackadder and Baldrick or John Cleese in Fawlty Towers) that made you titter so much it left you in pain.
The school food could bestow blessings too, on days when peanut butter filled the afternoon sandwiches, or we were given ice cream and hot chocolate sauce for pudding. The intensity of these things became aspects of life you’d always hunt for later on, though in the comparative freedom of adulthood their effects could only be diminished. Being away from home, too, gave you a concept of the place which no home, in later life, could ever quite live up to.
We ex-prep school pupils (or ‘boarding school survivors’, as current thinking has it) are often asked if our lives would be happier had we never been sent to one of these bearpits. Yet the experience was so total – and apparently so predestined, like much of childhood – it’s a bit like asking what the 20th century would have been like if neither world war had taken place.
Prep school, like living through the gulag, gave us a total identity, changing the language we used, the emotions we showed, the jokes we laughed at, perhaps even the betrayals we allow ourselves. Between those who have been through it there’s a recognition, a verbal shorthand, often an ease in each other’s company. There’s so much that doesn’t need to be said, not least that to describe this education as ‘privileged’ comes with all sorts of screaming ironies.
Just as strange is the lifelong (at the very least, ambivalent) attachment to this environment that moulded you so violently, and at such a young age. Last year, while house-hunting, I saw a flat just a few miles from my prep school and was struck by the thought that living as a free adult so close to the site of such memories might have its strange appeal. No longer being ruled by that institution, being able to spy it from afar, would be a kind of revenge on Bulmer Hall and all its monstrous power. But that in turn is proof, perhaps, of the continuation of that power, proof that you never get over your prep school – or at least, never quite move on.
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