Scarred for life by boarding school (continued)
We asked for your tales of emotional cruelty suffered at girls’ boarding schools. And they flooded in... LAST week, the Mail heard from women who suffered terrible cruelty as young girls at boarding school. Now our readers have bravely chosen to share the
SENT AWAY AT JUST THREE YEARS OLD
ANNIE CLULEY, 73, a counsellor, is divorced with three children and from Havant, Hampshire.
My Mother abandoned me when I was 18 months old. She was a headstrong, dysfunctional 21-year- old and my father was in the RAF, so I ended up living with my grandparents, who were still quite young.
I loved them very much, and I loved their house in Worthing, Sussex — it was big and beautiful, with gardeners and housekeepers, and they hired a Norland nanny for me. But still I was a bit of a nuisance — I interfered with their social life, their bridge parties and trips to Ascot — so at the age of three I was sent to a small boarding school just streets away from them.
there was a total lack of affection there, and I began to feel very empty inside. If I didn’t eat my food they would strap me into a high chair in the garden with a bowl full of horrible junket, an old-fashioned milk pudding, until I ate it.
I had to sleep in painful rag curlers which bruised my head, and then they’d brush my hair out roughly, almost violently, every morning. I had no toys and no possessions of any kind.
once my grandparents came to visit and gave me a box of crayons and a colouring book, but all the other children immediately fell upon them and I never saw a single crayon again. For such a little girl, it felt as if life was loss upon loss upon loss. I was lefthanded, too, but the staff made me do everything with my right hand. I developed a stutter, which stayed with me throughout my childhood.
For a great deal of my life, I had issues around rejection. that school set up a deep loneliness inside me, which was only really resolved when I began counselling in my 50s.
And yet when my first husband, a serviceman, insisted on sending our three boys to boarding school, I didn’t put up enough of a fight and let him do it. I bitterly regret that now. If I had my way, I would close every boarding school in the country.
I WAS BEATEN WITH A BROKEN CHAIR LEG
JAYNE GRAHAM, 56, an administrator, is separated, has two children and is from Milbrook, Cornwall.
I went off to boarding school in September 1968 at the age of nine. I was the eldest of four, living in Dubai among the military and Foreign office set, and boarding school was an inevitable, expected part of expatriate life.
But the Presentation Convent boarding school in Matlock, Derbyshire, was nothing like the fun, sisterly Mallory towers-type environment I’d imagined. Corporal punishment, and humiliation in particular, were very much the order of the day.
Any sign of individuality, independence, personal opinion or vanity was swiftly crushed. the rules were to be obeyed absolutely and without question; punishment for failure was swift and often painful.
Woe betide the girl whose bed was not made with absolute precision, f or example. She’d arrive back in her room after breakfast to find the bedclothes thrown messily on the floor and have only brief, frantic minutes to re- do the task before the bell went again.
Nothing at all was allowed on display — not so much as a comb. No pictures or photographs on the walls or windowsills, and certainly no teddies on the bed.
talking at night was punished with the back of a plastic hairbrush brought down hard across the back of a girl’s hand, several times. And once, when I dared to roll my eyes insolently heavenwards in front of a Sister, I was slapped across my face with such force, I landed in a crumpled heap on the floor. I can also remember the horrible pain of a broken chair leg across the back of my lower legs for refusing to hand over my personal diary.
But I didn’t ever cry. Not once. No one did. you fought it with every f i bre of your body: you couldn’t let them see that they had ‘broken’ you.
And what I endured was relatively minor compared with what my two brothers suffered under the care of the Jesuit brothers at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire. A whalebone covered in leather across bare buttocks was par for the course there.
People will perhaps be surprised that, after all that, I sent my own two children to boarding school. It has become an unfashionable thing to do, and I often found myself defending my decision.
But I always told both my son and daughter that I would remove them immediately if they could honestly t el l me t hey were miserable. And they never did.
Much has changed since I was a boarder, and some schools are now like hotels. My children loved their schooldays. But did it ever occur to me to send my daughter to a convent? Not for a second.
NOTHING BUT BREAD AND WATER TO EAT
SARAH WARD, 55, a healthcare professional, is married with two children and from Kent.
My Mother died when I was eight, and that same year, in the late Sixties, I was sent to boarding school, eventually ending up in a girls’ senior school in rickmans- worth, hertfordshire. It was pure misery. From the beginning, I wasn’t allowed to mention my mother in any way, let alone talk about her death, which in itself was a great cruelty. But overall we were horribly neglected, verbally abused and often humiliated. Bullying by older girls and staff members was rife.
I remember being continually ill with coughs and colds. We were never warm, and punishments for minor misdemeanours often involved standing outside in the cold with too few clothes on.
Sometimes we were made to pick up stones and put them in a bucket in the freezing cold, an utterly pointless task.
Once a child complained about the quality of food, so the housemistress made us stay in all day and eat only bread and water so we knew ‘ what hunger felt like’. It’s almost impossible to believe today.
Our hair was cut every week into a short pudding-basin style, and our letters home were censored so there was no way of telling parents or carers what was happening, even if we we’dd dared.
Whenever anyone important came to visit, we were forced to show them how good we were and how cheerful — but, in fact, I was desperately unhappy, and so were many others.
I can never forgive the way I was treated at school. It has left me with an awful lot of issues in my life and I’ve spent huge amounts of time and and money trying to sort them out ever since.
SADISTIC NUNS RUINED MY LOVE LIFE
DENISE STANDRING, 71, a retired secretary, is married to her third husband, has four children and lives in Wantage, Oxfordshire.
I WAS sent to La Sagesse Convent, a French boarding school in Golders Green, North London, at the age of seven, when my parents split up. It was a dark, gloomy-looking place with broken glass stuck on the walls to stop people getting in, or out.
I cried for weeks but no one seemed to care. And I was terrified, too. In fact the place was run on fear. Some girls us used to wet themselves, they were so afraid of getting into trouble with the nuns — and then, with terrible cruelty, they were made to wear their wet pants on their head and walk around the school so everyone could see them.
In any case, none of us was allowed to change our underwear more than once a week. I’ve no idea why that horrible rule existed, but it did ever since, as a result, I’ve been obsessive about cleanliness and washing and laundry.
When I was a very little girl I had a nanny whom I loved more than my mother, and sometimes she came to visit me even though our family no longer employed her. But my mother came to just one concert at the school in ten years, and I rarely spent a weekend at home with her. No one ever told me they loved me. Not once.
My great escape from the harshness of the regime was to play the piano, which I loved very much, but when I neglected my studies for it I was made to give it up. I remember how terrible that was even now.
I also remember going to Mass every day at 7.30am before breakfast or even a drink of water, and girls fainting from standing so long with nothing to eat or drink.
When I look at my children with their own kids, I see how they encourage them and hug them and tell them they love them. But I don’t know what that’s like. I grew up in a place where no one ever said those words. And when I left it, probably as a consequence, I picked the wrong men and had two bad marriages.
Even now, happily married to my third husband, I’m not sure I know what it is to be in love.