Scarred forlife by boarding school
We’ve all read of boys horribly abused at prep school. Now meet the women who say emotional cruelty left them...
SITTING at the end of her iron bed, nine-yearold Judith Okely sobbed uncontrollably for the father she had lost. So isolated was the little girl at her remote Isle of Wight boarding school, she’d not even known that he was seriously ill, let alone dying of polio.
It was less than an hour since her mother had broken the news. But now she was gone, bedtime in the sparse dormitory was approaching, and the matron was running out of patience.
‘She came up to me and snapped: “Your Daddy has died. I know that. But you are to stop crying at once. You know that you are not to make any noise after 7pm,” ’ recalls Judith.
‘I adored my father, so his death was the greatest loss of my life. Yet I was being ordered not to cry because it was inconvenient. After that, I never cried in public again. I retreated inside myself.’
Judith, a professor of anthropology, is in her late 60s now, but her voice still bristles with anger at the brutality she suffered during her nine years at the school. So far, concern about maltreatment of past generations of children at school has focused on the sex abuse which took place largely in boys’ prep schools.
But Judith is one of the growing number of ex-pupils who believe it’s time that the long-term trauma suffered by both girls and boys who went to boarding schools — from which some never fully recover — is recognised.
The irony is that many of these children inevitably come from ultra-privileged backgrounds—– and the schools they attended boasted beautiful historic buildings amid manicured playing fields.
But according to psychoanalyst Professor Joy Schaverien, author of new book Boarding School Syndrome, youngsters sent away to exclusive schools can suffer mentally just as much as those from deprived backgrounds who spent their childhoods in care.
‘These schools were supposed to be the making of them, but they could also be the breaking of them,’ says Professor Schaverien. ‘It was a form of child neglect that became traditional in this country.’
After 20 years working with and interviewing former boarders as part of her research, Professor Schaverien has identified a cluster of symptoms triggered by the trauma of being sent away. They include a tendency to depression, anger and anxiety, a failure to sustain relationships, a fear of abandonment and substance abuse.
The younger the child was sent away, the more profound the damage.
In the kitchen of her Oxford home, Professor Okely has a rather telling fridge magnet. It lists some of the rules of Alcatraz, the legendary high-security prison she visited in San Francisco.
It says: ‘Loud talking, shouting, singing or any other unnecessary noises are not permitted.’ At Alcatraz, says Judith, inmates were entitled to food, clothing, shelter and medical attention — but anything else was a privilege. And that, she says, is very much how it was during the nine years she spent in the Fifties boarding at Upper Chine School for Girls.
‘ Like Alcatraz, we were all captive on an island so there was no point trying to escape. Like jail, every waking moment was governed by rules, only the rules were stricter.’
‘But unlike prison or Borstal, we were told we were there because our parents loved us.’
ANDshe adds: ‘ The dorms were like cells. We had metal beds and a tiny side table. You were allowed two ornaments, perhaps a picture from home, and maybe one toy.
‘At dinner, when you weren’t eating, your hands had to rest in your lap. If you were seen resting them on the table, you would get a quick slap.
‘In the rest period after lunch, the matron forbade us from lying on our backs with our legs up because of what she saw as sexual overtones. But we didn’t even know what sex was,’ says Judith, whose school was later merged with a boys’ school and renamed.
‘Later my mother said: “Why didn’t you tell me how dreadful it was?” But as children, we didn’t know any different.
‘It wasn’t even a good education. The only books I ever read were under the sheets with a torch. Girls back then were raised to go to finishing schools and marry the right man. When I said I wanted to go to university, I was told I couldn’t.’
For many boarding school pupils, says Professor Schaverien, the most traumatic moment was when they first realised their parents were leaving them there.
Until the eighties, when sending children away to school began to fall out of fashion, the most common age for starting prep school was only eight.
PROFESSORSchaverien says: ‘ Many remember being left on the doorstep and then realising that the wheels of their parents’ cars were moving and they were being left behind. It’s then that reality dawned on them — often with traumatic after-effects.
‘ Sending a child away at a young age is a huge rupture in its attachment to its parents. From then on, they have to live without love. They have to develop a false self that cannot show their emotions, in order to survive. They then carry that false self throughout life.’
For former physiotherapist Margaret Laughton, the protective shell she developed to get through school led her to appear ‘competent and confident’ on the outside — even though she was enormously fragile underneath.
Until she started therapy in her 50s, she found it difficult to trust anyone in close emotional relationships. ‘ I was 70 before I organised a birthday party for myself because, having been at boarding school, I didn’t trust anyone to turn up,’ she says. ‘After all, if your own parents didn’t want you, why would anyone else want to be around you?’
even at 78, Margaret is still haunted by the memory of her first day at a school in the Midlands, which she declines to name. She was nine years old.
‘I was raised in India and a year after we got back, my mother took me for an entrance exam to the school and I was accepted on the spot. I was taken to the uniform shop and then delivered to a private boarding house as there was no room to sleep at the school.
‘I was left on the pavement crying as my mother drove off.’
It was when Margaret, from South London, had her own four children that she understood the lasting effects of the trauma.
‘When my eldest daughter got to the age of nine, I went into her bedroom to kiss her goodnight. I saw her comfy bed, her hair spread across the pillow and her arms wrapped around her teddy bar.
‘It hit me that this was exactly the age I had been sent away, but without toys, as I was told they might get lost. At that moment I realised what I had been deprived of — my parents, my friends, my room, my pets, my teddy bear. I
stood there and cried the first tears I ever shed for myself.’
The sexual abuse that many boys suffered at boarding schools is now widely recognised — but some claim it was simply part of a far wider pattern of emotional and physical cruelty.
James Taylor was sent away to a school at eight because his father, an ex-boarder, assumed his son would get the best possible education. At 49, James says he still does not sleep well because, from the age of 11, he was fetched by a teacher from his bed at night to be ‘disciplined’ — in fact, abused.
The absolute rule of silence after lights out meant when he was returned to the dormitory, he dared not breathe a word.
‘We were too frightened to speak out,’ says James, who does not want to name the school for legal reasons. ‘And, in any case, in those days none of us thought we would be believed.’
Yet casual cruelty by both teachers and boys was part of everyday life. ‘I saw a boy who was sick in his rice pudding being forced to eat it,’ says James. ‘I saw boys who wet their beds, who were then made more miserable by other boys who attacked them for it.
‘All this was seen as “collateral damage”, an unfortunate but necessary part of the process of turning boys into men who would one day rule the world.
‘There are the winners in this system, like the Prime Minister David Cameron, who boarded at Eton, but one size does not fit all.’
Simon Partridge, 68, compares the school to which he was sent at seven with ‘ polite prison’. The beauty of the buildings at Boarzell Prep in Sussex belied the ‘terrible emotional desert’ inside. ‘Going to school at that age was not presented as a choice. You were raised to be a brave little man and not to complain,’ he says.
‘It was an awful double tragedy. When I spoke to my mother about it in my 20s, she told me that when she got into the car to drive away, she burst into floods of tears.’
ForSimon, a widower, his days at boarding school came at a high personal cost. He was unable to settle on a career and had trouble forming lasting relationships.
‘I never said “I love you” in a heartfelt way.’
For Simon, the turning point came in his mid 50s when his stepgrandson, Josh, then three, turned to him one day in the car and told Simon he loved him. ‘ Tears were rolling down my cheeks. At that moment, I realised I couldn’t do the stiff upper lip any more. It was time to tell Josh I loved him, too.
‘It unblocked me. It struck me as terrible that children of seven could be sent away to a world where there was no physical contact, not even a hug when you felt ill.’
Although the worst of this emotional brutality took place in the past, for some children boarding is still a trial to be endured.
one in 200 children in the UK is a boarder — there are 70,000 in total — and for the first time after years of declining numbers, according to the Boarding Schools Association, the number of young children being sent away at the age of seven is rising.
In a globalised economy, high-flying careers increasingly require parents to move overseas.
of course, there are children who do well out of boarding. Those who go at an older age, like 13, or who make the choice to go themselves, or find there is more stability at school than there is at home, are more likely to benefit, say Professor Schaverien.
But, she insists, in most cases young children should be with their parents. ‘ Children need to be brought up in the company of people who love them,’ she says.
Simon Partridge is now training be a youth counsellor.
And he says: ‘If you were devising a system to emotionally cripple people, sending children away at the age of seven would be it.
‘ I feel I have lost an awful lot of my life to this. The reality is that the trauma at the privileged end of society is not so different from the trauma at the more deprived end.
‘The difference is that if you went to boarding school, you grew up believing you had no right to complain.’
TANITH Carey is author of Taming the Tiger Parent, published by Constable at £8.99. Boarding School Syndrome by Professor Joy Schaverien is published by routledge, at £27.99
DID you have a difficult time at boarding school and how has it affected your life since? Let us know your story by emailing femail@dailymail.co.uk