Mixed memories from the bad-at-games club
An account of boarding school from a writer scarred by the experience is gripping if melodramatic, says Rupert Christiansen
Reading this exposé of post-war private education has forcefully reminded me that I must have been one of the lucky ones – boarding from the age of 11 at prominent prep and public schools between 1966 and 1972, I never encountered sexual abuse of any kind. I was sometimes very unhappy, often happy enough – the higher one ranked in the hierarchy the nicer it got – but the knowledge that the end of term was nigh sustained me and meanwhile I would just have to put up with it. Not a bad lesson for life, I suppose.
Alex Renton, a little younger than me, considers himself less fortunate. He was only eight when he was dumped by his loving parents at Ashdown House in Sussex; later, he was sent to Eton. At both institutions, he was molested by members of staff, and the scars of his anger and confusion remain unhealed. He has now written a book that combines personal memoir with history and polemic, pretty squarely panning all aspects of the public school phenomenon, from its implicit élitism to its obsession with sport.
The result is impassioned, candid and thoroughly researched – worthy to stand alongside classic explorations of the subject by Royston Lambert and Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy. But although many of the episodes and statistics he presents are very disturbing, the physical violence and emotional cruelty on which he focuses are extrapolated from a small sample, and from my own experience I would suggest the picture they collectively paint of the sector is misleadingly bleak. Yes, I too was scarred in several respects by boarding a hundred miles from home – in particular through the permanent rupture of a close relationship with my mother – but at that tender age, everyone is thin-skinned and I am sure I would have suffered in other ways had I been a day pupil or at a state school.
Aside from his predators and parents, Renton excoriates an antiquated curriculum, the obsolete Victorian idealism of Dr Arnold of Rugby, and successive governments for not grasping the nettle and legislating the network into extinction. So much negativity becomes heavy-handed: surely one can allow some credit to the idea that “honour is more important than success, playing more important than winning”, let alone the possibility that toughening an indulged child up can be as “character-building” as cuddles or psychotherapy?
He is on much firmer ground when he berates a culture that allowed bullying, assault and rape to pass unreported and unacknowledged, often swept firmly under the carpet, with the guilt turned on to the victim – a habit that has only been kicked in the last few years. The account of an unnamed school still sub judice is appalling, with the police culpably slow to investigate six seriously accused staff and an alcoholic headmaster who was both a brilliant teacher and a sadistic pederast. But whose evidence can be trusted? I would be inclined to interrogate the rather wild statement that this monster “beat all hundred boys in the school in an afternoon”, reported without scepticism.
Renton does allow some light and shade into the bleak picture. “I didn’t dislike Eton,” he admits. A letter written to his younger sister when he was 10 announcing that “School isn’t nearly as bad as I always think it is. It’s always much better when you get back. In fact, it’s quite fun” seems to me close to the heart of the matter, and I can also warmly identify with his memory of being part of the louche “bad-at-games club”, whose resistance to the jingoistic norm was “tolerated and perhaps tacitly encouraged”.
It’s important to recognise that Renton has focused on a closed chapter. The private education sector has changed radically over the last 30-odd years. Some 30 per cent of the 70,000 pupils in some 200 boarding schools now come from abroad and, with annual fees hovering around £35,000, the JAM professional middle classes struggle to put their children through the system. Corporal punishment of the Jimmy Edwards variety is now effectively illegal. Mummy can be Skyped after prep and Skeleton Stew is no longer on the lunch menu.
Schools are generally more sensitive and genuinely liberal places than they were in Renton’s day, and the scandal of psychotic and unaccountable staff has at least been cleanly aired. Whether a certain erotic element can ever be eliminated from education is doubtful – since Socrates, the master-pupil relationship has always been one of love as much as respect – but the crisis now, surely, relates more to children with unlimited access to the perils of the internet, and problems such as anorexia and self-harming.
Stiff Upper Lip is shocking, gripping and sobering, but compared to Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s brilliant look at girls’ boarding schools, Terms and
Conditions, it can seem excessively melodramatic. St Custard’s was ghastly, but also hilarious: some of us emerged from it terribly damaged, but many of us also came out laughing. The tragic victims are properly honoured here, but we don’t get a glimpse of the Molesworths.
‘Renton excoriates an antiquated curriculum and the obsolete Victorian idealism of Dr Arnold’