Life lessons
As Mike Tindall says he won’t send his child to a school far away, one couple describe the lasting impact it can have on relationships
My husband has Boarding School Syndrome
It’s a subject that can test even the happiest of marriages: that of whether, and when, to send the children to boarding school. Last week, Mike Tindall revealed that he had no plans to follow royal tradition and send his daughter, Mia, to board – despite the fact that Mia’s mother, Zara Phillips, and a long line of royals before her, including Prince Philip and Prince Charles, attended Gordonstoun, the elite boarding school in Scotland.
“I know many people who say boarding was the making of them, but I don’t really want her to be distanced from us,” said the former England rugby captain, who attended Queen Elizabeth grammar school in Wakefield as a day student. “I’d rather she attend a school that’s nearby, where we’ll always be on hand if she needs us. Anything else goes against my instincts.”
He is not the first to call into question the long-term emotional legacy of being sent away to school too soon. Last month, the Old Etonian actor Damian Lewis, who started boarding when he was eight, said he found it “a very violent experience” and would not send his children at such a young age.
The psychologist Joy Schaverien was the first to identify Boarding School Syndrome – characterised by feelings of detachment, defensiveness and a difficulty with intimacy. Schaverien, who studied the trauma of the “privileged” child, says the impact of these experiences on the adult can be devastating.
Here, one couple, Miranda and Max Wilson, from London, talk about how Boarding School Syndrome has affected their relationship.
Miranda says:
There is a black-and-white picture in our family photo album of my husband, Max, aged seven, about to set off for boarding school.
He is smiling up at the camera dressed in his one-size-too-big blazer and matching cap.
It is an endearingly sweet image, but for me, the woman who married the man this little boy would grow into, that picture has also become a powerful symbol of some of the difficulties in our marriage.
Initially, I had been drawn to Max by exactly the combination of boyishness and easy-going confidence that a prep and public school education is supposed to bestow on a man. But as I discovered, there is much more going on beneath the veneer.
To the outside world, Max looks like one of the survivors of the boarding school system. So many of his public school mates fell by the wayside into drugs, mental ill-health and career failure.
Max was one of the supposed lucky ones – now a successful lawyer, sporty and well-built, he had the armour to be popular and ward off bullying.
But as he increasingly opened up to me, I could see how emotionally damaging being sent away so early had been. He told me how, for several months, a teacher would visit him once a week at night, lie down and press his body against him. While the teacher never kissed him, he would suck on Max’s bottom lip. What was even more shocking was that Max looked forward to the visits because they made him feel special. He was so starved of affection that he had come to see this inappropriate behaviour as almost a treat. Max had to develop strategies as a child to survive in a loveless environment, and this affected our relationship from the beginning. Rows would quickly escalate if Max felt criticised. He became defensive and would soon lose his temper. It was a natural response to having been brought up in an environment in which you risked ridicule if you let your defences down. If I was upset, he’d tell me “to pull myself together”, because that’s what he’d been told to do. The other issue we clashed over was disciplining our two children, now aged 13 and nine. If they did not do what they were told instantly, Max would lose it. He was raised in a world where you did not question authority for a moment, or you were beaten.
Normal tantrums or adolescent stroppiness are uncomfortable for him – he never had the space to express himself like that or practice how to manage his feelings.
Finally, aged 48, Max is slowly dismantling the damaging survival mechanisms he developed during his formative years. Though he recognises the effect those experiences had on him, he refuses therapy, saying he can work this out on his own.
Of course, this doesn’t mean boarding school is bad per se. I went to one at the age of 15 and thrived, when I was old enough to cope. While figures show that the number of seven- and eight-year-olds being sent to board is now going up again, the reality is that for some, the benefits of a classical education may never make up for the fact that when children such as my husband cried in the night, no one ever came. I vividly remember the day I arrived at my prep – a school of 200 boys, aged seven to 13, in Berkshire. There was the smell of wax floor polish and the acrid stench of boiled cabbage. And then there was the crunch of the gravel as my parents’ car drove away – without me.
Until then I had never spent a single night away from my family. However, I never questioned why this was happening. My father and three older brothers had been sent to the same school at the same age. Homesickness was simply collateral damage – the first night was the only time I ever cried, stifling my sobs with the standard issue red blanket.
From then on my life was spent in a state of vigilance trying to avoid being a target for the casual cruelty that pervaded the place. The only toy I brought from home was a small cinnamon-coloured cat and it didn’t take long for his button eyes to be ripped off.
In later years, I felt flattered by the attentions of the teacher who became my midnight visitor. I would try to stay awake for his visits, but if he did come after I nodded off, he would put my slippers on the ledge as a sign he had been there. It was our secret code.
When I started forming relationships in my teens and early twenties, girls were just conquests. I wanted the sex, but intimacy and affection would scare me.
When I first met Miranda, I found it hard to let my guard down. We had a false start when I cheated on her with someone else because I was still uncomfortable with commitment. But she appeared less needy than other women, and wasn’t afraid to challenge my behaviour, which has got us through.
But it was only when I saw how unformed my own children were at the age of seven that it finally clicked how being sent away from home must have changed me.
While I am not prepared to go through therapy – which I would loathe – I will revisit my past experiences and am consciously trying to open up emotionally. Leafing through old reports, I can see Matron measured me as 4ft 2in and 4st – a sobering reminder of how small I was. I also watched
The Making of Them, the TV documentary about the prep school experience, and saw other boys trying so hard to be brave little soldiers as they were left behind. I realised then I was looking at myself.
‘If I was upset, he’d tell me to pull myself together, because that’s what he’d been told to do’