Men's Accounts of Boarding School

Sent Away

Margaret Laughton, Allison Paech-Ujejski, Andrew Patterson, Margaret Laughton, Allison Paech-Ujejski, Andrew Patterson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000339512
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
• Index: Psychology

Men's Accounts of Boarding School is a collection of writings by men about their childhood experiences of being sent away to boarding school.

In these narratives, the men discuss their feelings through their years at school and how this has affected them in adulthood. They give individual views of how living away from home, in an institutional setting, has impacted on their lives.

Much has been written about the adverse effects of early separation and broken attachments, and these men illustrate this research in their accounts. This book will be insightful and useful reading for therapists working with the issues of Boarding School Syndrome, as well as former boarders.

1 Memories

Introduction by Joy Schaverien

The editors of this volume have asked me to write an introduction to this, the first section of this book, entitled Memories. The idea is to contextualise these contributions for the professional readership, for psychotherapists and academics interested in the profound impact of early boarding on the psychological development of young children.

Reading these contributions evokes a great depth of sadness. The stories are heart-breaking; each one is an original tale of the terrible, uncomprehending suffering endured by small children sent far from their homes to be schooled by strangers. The awful repetitiveness of the stories contributes to our understanding of the ubiquitous nature of the loss and emotional trauma suffered by these children. This has often gone unnoticed until relatively recently, and yet it has a history going back for many generations (Brendon 2009). Sadly, as someone who has worked in psychotherapy for many years with ex-boarders, these stories are not unfamiliar to me. However, in each case the details of the specific suffering are unique. I began publishing on this topic in 2004 (Schaverien 2004) and, since then, I have received emails and messages from men and women who now live all over the world. Each has a story to tell, and all are tragic tales of premature loss, bereavement and abuse suffered by young children. Many have felt unable to speak of their suffering until recently, usually when they have become aware that there are now people who recognise this form of suffering as genuine. This means that they can now begin to believe their own perceptions, and so their experience is validated.

Therefore, publishing the very personal stories in this section of the book makes a contribution to exposing the suffering, abuse and neglect that many children sent to boarding school at a young age endure. Each of the contributions to this anthology gives a vivid sense of the lasting distress borne by children who experienced early boarding. These tales offer a nuanced picture of an intergenerational scandal; a portrait of neglect and abuse of children across the world, all in the name of privileged education. This is anecdotal evidence but assembled here as it is, it amounts to witness testimony and so to a form of evidence. It contributes to our understanding of not only the initial trauma but also its impact lasting into adult life. The pain of these adult men as they look back and reflect on their child selves is profound.

It is for this reason that this book will be of interest beyond the general reader. It will engage the psychotherapy clinician interested in the aetiology of Boarding School Syndrome (Schaverien 2015) and academics interested in the history and personal testimony of survivors. For too long the stories of boarding school trauma have been told in a jocular manner with the caveat that ‘it never did me any harm’. Well, this book shows that when the survivor has the courage to remember and face the truth of his own experience, this is far from the falsehoods he has been brought up to believe. Each of the men writing in this section is proving the lie. For each one the experience did them great harm and, as we know now, they are far from alone in their suffering.

For therapists reading these accounts it is well to remember that these stories are not uncommon; they often underlie the initial presentation of our clients, who mention in passing that they attended a boarding school. With ex-boarders we are dealing in the main with adults who have, as young children, suffered significant emotional trauma; many have been estranged from their families since the day they were left alone in boarding school. The problem for psychotherapy may be that, having learned not to complain, the ex-boarder will not immediately reveal this suffering to his therapist. Rather, the psychotherapist, alerted by these tales, might hear between the lines to the sad child within the adult. It is our task to listen behind the words to the underlying message and so to help the person to unearth the original wound.

As we know from infant research, children separated from their attachment figures at a young age suffer multiple wounds. In some cases, this is due to an acknowledged but unavoidable family situation. In the cases of many boarders it is parental choice. Each of the moving tales in this section gives insight into the depth of the tragedy of this early rupture. The tales of beatings, deprivation, bullying and sexual abuse described here are indeed shocking but unfortunately not unusual.

Joy Schaverien, PhD, is a Jungian Psychoanalyst and Art Psychotherapist. She is a Training Analyst at the Society of Analytical Psychology London.

Her latest book is a new edition of The Dying Patient in Psychotherapy: Erotic Transference and Boarding School Syndrome, published by Routledge in 2020.

Website: www.joyschaverien.com

References

1. Brendon, V (2009) Prep School Children: A Class Apart over Two Centuries, London: Continuum.
2. Schaverien, J (2004) ‘Boarding School: The Trauma of the ‘Privileged’ Child’, Journal of Analytical Psychology, 49 (5), pp. 683–705.
3. Schaverien, J (2015) Boarding School Syndrome: The Psychological Trauma of the ‘Privileged’ Child, London: Routledge.

1.1 For my own good

Mike Timms

‘It’s for your own good’. That’s what I was told before receiving the first beating I was given at boarding school. It came at the age of seven and a half, and it was for ‘talking after lights out’. A minor offence, in reality, elevated to a more serious crime by the fact that it deserved the administration of three strokes of a slipper to my pyjama-clad bottom by the headmaster of the school.

I could not see how this experience was for my good in any way. I could understand that it might teach me to cringingly obey the rules and therefore ‘be good’ according to what the powers that be, decreed was good. But it wasn’t for my own good. I didn’t know this at the time, not in a way that I could state – because I didn’t have the concepts clearly formed. But if my mind didn’t know this, my body and my spirit certainly did. These exuberant, yet-to-be-muzzled, parts of me could not obey external rules so readily.

There was so much to say and process with my new friends at the end of the day that ‘Lights Out’ could not switch off. Thus it was that the most minor of offences became the one I was most frequently punished for. It was for my own good that they wanted me to be quiet.

This first beating happened at age seven and a half, and about 28 hours after I said goodbye to my parents to take my first taste of being away from Mummy and Daddy. Of course it would never happen like that today. It can’t: corporal punishment has since been prohibited in schools by an even greater authority than the schools who had ordained it.

But this vignette is, perhaps, a useful metaphor. Today, I cannot recall anyone telling me that this boarding school experience was for my own good at that very time. It was going to get me a ‘better educational opportunity’ and so could be for my own good, but ‘later on in life’. For now, the thinking seemed to be, we must make sacrifices: Daddy and Mummy of their money to pay for this, and me of my need for love, closeness and someone to tell things to – after lights out if necessary – and without fear of punishment.

It’s often said that the grass is greener on the far side of the hill and I believe my family not only smelled that grass but imagined a Shangri-La there that was my future life, over-arched by a fine rainbow. And here, right here in this boarding school, was the Yellow Brick Road I was being asked to walk, for it was the way to get there.

‘No Talking After Lights Out’ was a school rule. There were 20 school rules, and they were posted on the wall of the main notice board. At this remove, I cannot recall any of the others – save one, the last one. It stated: ‘A breach of Common Sense is a Breach of School Rules’. And I have to confess that neither can I recall anyone being punished for offending against the twentieth school rule, yet that is the one that is most deeply ingrained in my consciousness. At the time, it seemed a catch-all. ‘If we haven’t got you with the previous nineteen, we’ll get you with this one’.

But that writing on the wall taught me more than that. It taught me that the preceding rules must be common sense. And if adults were telling me that silence after ‘Lights Out’ was common sense, they must also be telling me that it was common sense to be silent when I was told:

• Not to talk in line
• Not to talk in assembly
• Not to talk as our crocodile walked into assembly
• Not to talk when teacher went out of the class
• Not to talk when teacher was in the class (except if I put my hand up and waited to be called on to speak)

At school in the 1950s there was no talk of children’s rights. Later, in adolescence, I learned about the concept of human rights but saw these as something to be applied to ‘oppressed minorities’. I could not see myself as being in that category.

It’s been a long journey from my mid-20th century boarding schools to the present time and a very slow unwinding of the inhibitions and uncertainties which grew inside Little Mike all those years ago as I kept in what yearned to come out. At first, keeping it all in because I knew I wasn’t allowed to talk, and then keeping it all in because I wasn’t sure it was right, or proper, or – oh dear – manly to think these things never mind say them.

Today, I’m all right. I have learned what things are for my own good. Boarding School has not been one of them.

1.2 Tying it all together

Crispin Ellison

I arrived at the school in September 1963. Some of the original stone buildings, of the 16^th and 17^th centuries, still stood but as the school had grown, so new brick buildings had been added. The school catered for 360, almost all boarders.

We were expected to ‘get over’ homesickness. Only decades later did I understand that homesickness is a form of grief. Although I had boarded for my last year at prep school, it was still a shock to be in a strange and new place away from family and friends. Having only the term before been a House Captain at prep school, it was a shock now to be at the bottom of the pile. We first-year boys were used as cheap labour. It worked in two ways. Firstly, we had a number of cleaning jobs to do on the ground floor of the house every week. These included dusting the common room, corridors and library, cleaning and waxing the floors and the large communal tables, cleaning the floors, basins and showers of the changing rooms and polishing any brassware such as door handles and finger plates. We were not, it seemed, expected to clean the toilets or windows. The toilets were outside and usually freezing. An 8-inch gap under each cubicle door allowed you to see a person’s feet to know if it was occupied.

Secondly, we could be summoned by any sixth-former or prefect to run an errand or undertake a task. They either rang an electric bell by the House Captain’s study or simply yelled ‘Boyee!’. We had to run to the caller in response and would be punished if we did not. Tasks included making up and lighting the fire in the House Captain’s study, going to get books from the library, taking a message to a person in a different house, obtaining an item from the tuck shop, cleaning the House Captain’s Combined Cadet Force boots/belt/brassware and so on. I Iearned how to set a good fire in a grate, and how to get a good shine on boots or shoes – but I did not understand what on earth this subservience was meant to achieve.

We slept in dormitories – draughty rooms with bare boards, high ceilings, inadequate heating, iron-framed beds and what felt like horsehair mattresses. I started off in an 8-bed dormitory, then, as I became older, progressed to a 14-bedded or 16-bedded dormitory. Any personal possessions we owned we could keep in a locker in the main common room; however, there were no locks, so it was safer not to have anything very private or valuable. No-one had soft toys but instead had stuff such as model aeroplane kits.

The school uniform included separate, starched collars attached with studs. Those collars may have been easier and cheaper to wash than shirts, but were awful to wear, chafing the skin. Other anachronisms included straw boaters in summer with cravats for those who had earned the privilege.

If the physical contrast with life at home, or school near home, was significant, the emotional contrast was greater. It seemed there was no-one to go to if something small was worrying you – bigger worries I could take to the housemaster or to Matron if I dared. But the Housemaster towed the party line, and Matron was a slightly strange, older woman I never felt I could confide in – nor did anyone else. So I kept things to myself that at home I would have talked about. We all did, for news of anything that hinted at ‘difference,’ let alone ‘weakness’, spread like wildfire and was a cause for mocking at the least, but more likely, bullying. And so I learned that coping at school required a different approach, of keeping emotional stuff secret, of fitting in, following the majority view and thinking that this was how I would become a man.

I abided by the rules and kept my head down, suppressing the more natural me. Not just at the beginning, but for all the years I was there. There were rules everywhere: school rules, to be learned by heart and tested; house rules, about where you were forbidden to be at different times of day; rules about when certain jobs had to be done; rules how to address senior boys and unwritten rules. For instance, we had to hold a door open for any boy senior to us. Some would make you hold the door for ages so that you quickly learned who was an egotist and who had some compassion. Many of these rules appeared to be about hierarchy and conformity.

However, I understood that I was privileged to be there, that boarding school cost my parents a great deal of money and had, I was told, superior facilities: good-quality playing fields, a proper stage and auditorium, laboratories, a prize-winning chapel and a reservoir nearby to sail on. Much better than your average secondary modern or grammar school, it was said – by both my parents and the school staff. How would I know? I had nothing to compare with.

Boarding schools were also said to provide superior education to state schools. As far as I could tell, a few teachers at my school were good, but others really were not cut out for it and some were plain odd. One, a very short man, was known for throwing chalk very hard at miscreants – he had a good aim, right in the middle of the forehead – and for occasionally hitting boys. Another teacher, a very troubled man, took his own life during my second year.

Every three weeks during term-time we were allowed out for a Sunday. As I lived far away, I went to relatives. It was wonderful to be with family, but all too soon, it was time to go back. The shadow of the imminent return to school coloured the whole day.

I missed real connections to my family, to my friends and to normal community life. That feeling did not diminish but grew as the terms passed. It was hard to maintain...