My son and various well-meaning friends have been advising me to abandon writing history books and cash in on the trend for boarding school misery memoirs. On the face of it, as someone who was sent away aged seven and remained in these institutions until I was 18, I am well qualified to add my contribution to what has now become a recognised sub-genre of English literature. My problem, though, is that I quite enjoyed my time at boarding schools and I cannot claim – as so many do – that it adversely affected my life; rather the reverse.
In his extended essay ‘Such, such were the joys’, George Orwell recorded his awful schooldays at St Cyprians, a snobbish boys preparatory school in Eastbourne. There he suffered the fetid smells of urine, dried crud on porridge bowls, pathetic canings by the headmaster and the sadistic antics of his wife Flip. Though some contemporaries claimed Orwell exaggerated his account, the damage was done. Prep schools were forever pictured as hellholes.
I was beaten there too of course, but justly so, for attempting to steal rifles and a Bren machine gun
In 2021, Louis de Berniers wrote about abuse at his boarding school, Grensham House. In the same year, Old Radleian Richard Beard argued in his book Sad Little Men that boarding schools damage their pupils while preparing them for power, thus create old boys like Boris Johnson who damage us all. This year, Charles Spencer’s memoir, A Very Private School, detailed his experience of prep school cruelty. It topped the charts. The Times and Telegraph have published similar accounts by Simon Mills and A.C. Grayling. Even the Speccie has joined the chorus: my friend Robin Ashenden has recently........