The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Public beatings, toxic teachers, sexual abuse
Uncovering the dark side of boarding school
In the 1970s and ’80s, the ‘resiliencebuilding’ eccentricities of British boarding school life hid daily cruelty and unspeakable crimes – with memories of these traumatic experiences being relived by former pupils in adulthood. Novelist James Scudamore looks into a complicated legacy
I went to boarding school when I was 10. Stories of first arrival are always the same: the shredded nerves, the nausea, the strangeness of leaving the known world to enter a new one where love, security and privacy are no longer assured. The serious wrench comes when the family car, which in that moment has become the encapsulation of all the safety and comfort of home, drives away.
It’s traumatic when it happens for the first time because it is unthinkable. Many ex-boarders report not having fully comprehended that it was going to happen until it did. The psychoanalyst Joy Schaverien, who coined the term ‘boarding-school syndrome’, calls this the ‘threshold moment’. She describes how, for some, the memory of it is obliterated in later life by protective amnesia, while for others it becomes etched on the brain, to be relived endlessly thereafter.
My own arrival in 1987 at a boarding school in the Midlands, after years of education abroad, was dramatised by extreme weather. There’d been a heavy snowfall, and the building’s ancient plumbing had frozen and burst. Water dripped everywhere. The place was littered with buckets. Because the toilets were out of action, a section of the garden had been designated as a makeshift latrine. We were instructed to bring back containers full of snow whenever we paid it a visit, to be used for teeth-cleaning and other ablutions later on, being mindful to acquire these from untainted ground.
My family was not one of those that had been in the habit of sending away its offspring for generations. They wouldn’t have been able to afford it for a start. The fees were taken care of by ICI, the company to which my father gave most of his working life, and which had shipped him, my mother, my sister and me out to Brazil three years earlier (we’d also spent several years in Japan). Beyond the copy of The Compleet Molesworth (Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle’s classic series about fictitious school St Custard’s) I’d received for Christmas, I had absolutely no frame of reference for what I encountered.
I was incredibly homesick and cried for days until I realised that it wasn’t going to change anything. But the eccentricity of the place was diverting. There was a vertiginous sense of old certainties draining away, a nervy and not always unpleasant feeling that anything could happen here. That possibility for boundless adventure that fuels all the classic stories of boarding-school literature.
It was strictly forbidden for pupils to bring their own food, because this might lead to problems with rodents. You were, however, quite welcome to bring your own hamster or gerbil, and if you did, you could bring as much food as you liked for them. There was a zoo of cages at the foot of the main stairs, from which half-gobbled fragments of seeds spilled out constantly through the metal grilles in the floor and into the heating ducts beneath, where, one assumes, rodents ran amok in the monsoon of sanctioned rodent food from above.
A friend who attended a similar establishment reports that at his, pupils were encouraged to keep all manner of exotic animals. One boy caused a panic in the laundry room when he put his shorts in the wash forgetting that he’d left his baby grass snake in their pocket. Another lost his pet frog when he went swimming with it in the school pond.
Something I noticed early on was that the male teachers all shouted a lot. It seemed so preposterous at first that I thought it must be an act. Which it was, in a way. Often it was jovial. You’d be taking a quiet moment in a dormitory or changing room when some booming teacher would burst in and rupture the silence by challenging you to a quick-fire geography test or a spot press-up competition. The loudness acted as a corrective to introspection, quelling any potentially maudlin feelings by snapping you out of them.
And then there was the other kind of shouting. The serious kind. The eye-popping, apoplectic kind. Which was often accompanied by acts of violence: all the clichéd ones you already know, like the chucked board rubber or the tweaked ear or the weaponised gym shoe, but other, more inventive ones too.
I well know that at times we were foul little creatures with dreadful personal hygiene and a diabolical ability to wind them all up. One kid famously climbed out of a first-floor window during a dull lesson and into the tree outside so he could arrive back into the room, apologise for being late and see if the teacher noticed. He didn’t. So the boy did it again. You can’t put a price on provocation like that.
But it’s quite an escalation from that kind of misbehaviour to decide to discipline a child of 12 or 13 by striking him around the head with a metre ruler with such force that it splinters, or pinning him up against a wall by his throat, or kicking him down a flight of stairs – all of which happened at my school. You learned who to steer clear of. And there were many lovable characters as well as the one or two dangerous ones. Deep eccentrics who had found refuge and purpose in institutional life. These people had no control at all. Their lessons were mayhem.
All this was a far cry from my day school in São Paulo where the teachers were either amiable British expats or delightfully charismatic Brazilians, and where you spent the afternoon shooting hoops on the basketball court or playing water polo before going to the café on the corner for a burger and a milkshake.
Whenever you talk to former inmates over a certain age about this, they’re all too ready to weigh in like the competitive Yorkshiremen in the Monty Python sketch, and tell you how lightly you got off. That they had ice on their sheets and were caned until they bled. On and on it goes. And then the conversation invariably drifts into a kind of stupefied hilarity, because one thing I have noticed is that most people who went to an English boarding prep school before 1989 (when the Children Act, a complex bit of legislation that among other things outlawed corporal punishment in schools, was passed) are acutely – and fondly – conscious that their experience there represents a dose of the unusual that will probably never be equalled. The fondness endures in spite of whatever else may have happened to them. They cheerfully confirm that they were beaten senseless while also rhapsodising about the joys of breakfasting on eggy bread or playing British Bulldogs in the sunset. Stockholm Syndrome notwithstanding, it is perfectly possible for trauma and nostalgia to coexist.
Eventually I settled, though it took a long time. And I left at 13 feeling relieved and relatively unscathed. But there was always a nagging sense that something – beyond the obvious – had not been quite right. The place had an atmosphere that was menacing and sad, and it wasn’t just the pupils who felt it. In a bizarre coincidence, a girlfriend at university turned out to have gone for a job interview there in her gap year. She and her father had found it so bleak that they hadn’t even got out of their car.
And then in my 20s, the stories of sexual abuse started to come out. I was living in Paris at the time, and my mother rang to tell me as soon as she saw the press coverage. I could hear the worry in her voice. A conviction followed. The teacher I had thought merely nasty turned out to have been systematically predatory and calculating. Fellow pupils I had assumed to be naturally introverted or to have a problematic home life turned out to have been enduring something far worse than the odd thrashing with a gym shoe, over years, with dire threats of what would happen if they dared to tell.
Again, the stories are depressingly universal. A child is singled out for special treatment – extra tuition, sports coaching, outward-bound activities. They are made to feel exceptional in a system defined by intense stratification. Given a golden opportunity to transcend the levels and fraternise with those at the very top of the tree. Then, when boundaries are crossed – the hand in the shorts, the enforced nakedness – the secrecy and shame kick in.
For me, the revelation was simultaneously a complete shock and entirely unsurprising. I went back over my own memories and assessed them afresh. Events that had stuck in my mind for their oddness took on far more sinister implications. I felt overwhelming bursts of sympathy for fellow pupils who had suffered in silence. Alongside colossal relief, I also felt a kind of twisted survivor’s guilt that it hadn’t happened to me. I couldn’t believe my own dumb ignorance, which would have continued entirely undisturbed had it not all come to light. So I do have some sympathy with those in situations like this who say that they just didn’t know it was going on. Not all, though.
‘In my 20s, stories of sexual abuse started to come out. My mother rang – I could hear the worry in her voice’
Graham Greene wrote that childhood is the bank at which, later in life, a writer will cash his creative cheques. And I have noticed how much my fiction is characterised by the presence of untrustworthily charismatic and powerful men, by sudden and complete changes of circumstance, by the revelation of information which forces the reassessment of everything that has gone before. But I resisted taking on the subject of boarding-school abuse directly for a long time.
Then one evening in January of 2016, I stepped on some rotten planks in the dark and fell down a manhole near a building site. Something about the way this event muscled so powerfully into my life made me think again about all the abuse victims whose stories I’d heard over the years, from my school and others. About the holes that they had unwittingly stepped into as children, dropping out of their lives and into a darker, more painful place. I abandoned the novel I had been writing and began researching the subject in earnest.
I became fascinated by accounts of the carapaces boarding pupils build around themselves – the old notion of ‘resilience’ that was routinely touted as the arch benefit of a boarding school education. Joy Schaverien has called this the ‘armoured self ’. Nick Duffell, another psychotherapist who has devoted his career to working with what he calls ‘boarding school survivors’, invented the term ‘strategic survival personality’ for the brave-faced, defensive position that boarders adopt to survive. The work of these professionals, and that of the journalist Alex Renton in his powerful book Stiff Upper Lip, invaluably document the extent of physical, sexual and emotional abuse suffered by many boarders over the years.
It bears saying that my research has thrown up plenty of testimonies from ex-boarders who proclaim themselves to have been perfectly happy at their schools, where the eccentricity didn’t mask anything more sinister. But I’ve also heard accounts of a headmaster who administered public beatings with a camel whip, of teachers who so fetishised the sticks they used for punishment that they gave them names. For the wrong kind of teacher, all that quirkiness was useful. It blurred the boundaries, making it harder to define the moment when a line was crossed from the unusual to the criminal.
I have heard so many stories of children who started out cheerful and outward-looking only to become unaccountably aggressive or introverted after they went to school. And so many stories of suicide.
When your emotional ties to home have been severed and forced to reform around your peer group and your teachers, you become uniquely susceptible to grooming. When an opportunity for connection of any kind comes along, you seize it gratefully. This accounts for the feelings of conflict in survivors of sexual abuse in school – feelings that ‘it can’t have been abuse, because I liked it’. When you’re a child and people seem permanently furious with you, you assume you must have done something to deserve it. When love disappears from the world, you take it wherever you can get it. As the protagonist of English Monsters, my novel about boarding school, observes: ‘children don’t analyse, they only experience.’
Often the silence isn’t broken until well into adulthood. I have read innumerable accounts of boarding-school abuse victims having buried their experience until something brings it back 20 or 30 years later. In many cases the trigger is becoming a parent. The sight of your own child taking up swimming lessons or joining a Scout group. In that moment, the years fall away and the ugly past is revealed. You see yourself in the being you would do anything to protect. Which gives you the shove you needed to come forward.
No matter how benign they say their establishment was, something always comes up when people I have spoken to start relating their experience. ‘Yes, perhaps it was odd in retrospect that we were awarded “modesty minuses” [demerit points] if we covered our genitals between the gym locker and the swimming pool changing rooms.’ ‘Now that I think about it, it wasn’t right that our teachers insisted on checking inside our games shorts before every match to make sure we weren’t wearing underpants.’
The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), announced in 2014,has turned up evidence relating to almost every British institution during the 1970s and 1980s. But there is an extra dimension of privilege in the private boarding school system that leads to a powerful mental cocktail of associations in the minds of its high-achieving survivors. Nick Duffell calls this the ‘entitlement illusion’ – the feeling of superiority that ‘acts as compensation for the loss of childhood and the inability to empathise’.
The expression ‘toxic masculinity’ has acquired all of the hazy capaciousness of the next buzzword, but the word ‘toxic’ is well chosen. When they shouted, it was like a venom entering your system. It made the children aggressive in turn. Prefects screamed at kids only a year or two younger than them, and were only too happy to mete out their punishments. In all the recent conversations about the devastating effects of patriarchy and toxic masculinity, it occurs to me that there is more to be said about how damaging these phenomena have been to children.
Today’s boarding schools are a different world: corporal punishment is a thing of the past and pupils can be in touch with home whenever they want on their mobile phones. There is work to be done – it is still not a statutory duty in this country for those who work with children to report allegations of abuse (as it is in the US, Australia and Canada). According to a briefing note published in 2018 by the IICSA, ‘the UK Government’s position is that… the case for mandatory reporting has not been made’. But the unique environment of the old boarding preparatory school is gone.
After that initial shock of arrival, psychologists talk about one of the other seminal moments for boarders as being the one when the child realises that their parents have chosen this course of action for them – that it wasn’t even something that happened by accident. Which makes it all the more mystifying that so many parents who’d been utterly miserable at boarding school decided to send their own children away in turn.
English Monsters by James Scudamore is published by Jonathan Cape on
5 March (£16.99)
‘I’ve heard of teachers who so fetishised the sticks they used for punishments they gave them names’