Children in real danger of being ‘spoiled’ need distance from a dangerous psychically exploitative mother. Then they do desperately need a father to protect them from her excesses. Similarly, a mother can do something to shield a child from the tyrannical nature of her husband. But these counter-reactions easily produce over-reactions. The father who recognises the problem of the over-indulgent mother usually thinks that more harshness is called for, and comes down more firmly on the child. Sending these children off to boarding school can be a disaster for them. If they have had a mother who cannot authentically meet another’s needs they can become targets for bullying, and can get crushed. The child of an overwhelming mother needs lots of love, as well as autonomy. Popularly, we use the word ‘spoiled’ rather harshly, as a put-down. The reality is that such a mother can set the scene for a lifetime of humiliation and defence for her child. As one man who clearly had such a overbearing mother poignantly told me in my consulting room:

"People have been telling me all my life how spoiled I have been, when in reality no one has ever had a good word to say about me."

If mother is missing, which is a given for the boarding school child, she is also subject to replacement, whether in actuality or fantasy. As for replacement mother figures, there are precious few at school apart from Matron. What resonance this word has: it is as if Mother had been slightly altered to become an institution. I remember how the word would come up in Latin lessons, and I would imagine the Romans in the Senate or in battle; how odd it seemed that they too had matrons, how stuffy I imagined them to be. In my public school house, Matron was a middle-aged woman who had a remarkable curt efficiency with all matters connected to that temple of temptation, the body, such as laundry, name tags and minor ailments. She gave off an aura of almost imperceptible sadness, but I guess she must have been terribly isolated, living in that old place in the middle of nowhere. One of the great pleasures was to be allowed on rare occasions to toast bread on the end of a fork in front of the gas fire in her work-room. Matrons were mainly a replacement of the Mother-who-does-the-chores, and certainly tended to reinforce the gender stereotypes which male boarders would be prone to pick up. It is hard to imagine what their lives would have been like – often pretty dismal I imagine, in those regimented and funless places.

Next as potential mothers were the wives of masters and housemasters whose presence lent a deceptive sense of civilisation to the premises. Importantly, these women were someone for your mother to talk to at the initial meeting for new boys and their kin, when your parents were respectfully treated as the customers they were. These women were generally paradigms of home-counties middle-classness. We only rarely saw them. We practised our charm on them, hoping in some vague way that the good impressions we might make with them, would somehow percolate through to their husbands and influence them to be favourably disposed to us. I suppose we needed to use them to work out some of our Oedipal issues, which we could not otherwise do, because we were not at home.

There were also women connected with the only legitimate way of getting temporary respite from the rigours of boarding life – being ill. In the prep schools there might only be matron, but in the larger schools there would be nurses and even sisters. In crisp white uniforms, they rustled and bustled, and had the legitimate power to forbid you to take part in the normal daily routine. Hooray! Even if the price was starvation with kaolin and morphine, the regular antidote for upset tummy – a common complaint – it was worth it. I remember the sense of security of being in the ‘Infirmary’, with its privacy, beds, radios, glasses of squash, and women to ask how you were. I also remember at my prep school, quartered in the ‘wet’ dormitory (unjustly, for I was ‘dry’) being dimly aware of the young nurse who would rustle in at midnight to awaken or change those poor fellows who could not hold their pee. This memory is coloured by a delicious sense of safety. There is clearly plenty of room to speculate here on the effect of this set up on our sexuality. How readily might we build on this to make women, who were already becoming unfamiliar, into fantasy figures, whether goddesses or servants. Their absence was the greatest possible stimulus for fantasising, behind which there could be a vague fear that women might always let us down. Here is John Le Carré, in A Perfect Spy, telling us how Magnus Pym dealt with the loss of both his mother and her successor, while he was at prep school:

"Her demise entrenched him as a self-reliant person, confirming in him his knowledge that women were fickle and liable to sudden disappearances."