Such unrealistic ideas of women were to be expected, given their scarcity and the enforced spartan manliness of the schools. Our longings for rescue and comfort were mixed with those unaccountable stirrings in our loins. The official line which made sex dirty and to be feared was mixed with the peer group attitude that it was a passport to heaven. This concoction had the combined effect of ensuring that we would emerge without the slightest realistic idea of what a woman might be. As mother goddesses they would inevitably disappoint, for marriage and relationship actually means that you have to learn to get on with a real person, a real live woman, with her own feelings, wishes, moods and limitations, who may not be entirely focused on serving you. As erotic tramps, or eternally ready sex-objects, the other favourite male fantasy, women would also disappoint, for exactly the same reason. We will think more about the complexities of boarding school’s sexual conflicts in the next chapter.

Growing up in Community

From what we have been discussing it could be argued that the ideal would be to bring children up in the two parent nuclear family. However, if enormous difficulties and stresses of parenting are not shared out and relieved in the wider community, as they might have been in the old extended family, or in Liedloff’s tribe, for example, then nuclear families are far from ideal. African shaman and writer on ritual and community, Malidoma Somé, himself a survivor of fourteen years at boarding school, says that it takes a village to bring up a child. This seems to make complete sense to me. But farming-out parenthood to professionals in institutional communities, and thereby subcontracting the work, responsibility, and the care will not do either. This is true whether it be to social workers or boarding school staff.

If boarding schools accept that children are left with them, in loco parentis, as a contractual duty, how can they possibly succeed? The ratio of say 30 or 40 children to one housemaster is far too high. Anyone who has been a parent will testify that two children will test you to the limit. This is as true today as it was 30 or 50 years ago. Boarding schools compensate for the scarcity of parents by delegating authority roles to older children. It is said to encourage social responsibility, but there is no guarantee. It can also foster élitism and increase the children’s fear of each other. Government by divide and rule may be powerfully effective in schools as in nations, but it is not a recipe for health or longterm stability. Besides, there is, I believe, a natural law that states that children should not be brought up by other children. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, ironically, deemed important enough to study when I was at school in the early sixties, is a testimony to this. The children end up scapegoating and killing a fat child, who becomes the sacrificial victim, symbolising their own lostness.

Public schools have traditionally made loud claim for the value of their community life. But a community life built at the expense of caring and belonging needs satisfied by self-betrayal, is unlikely to be wholesome. In the case of the public schools the dynamics of power are weighted in favour of rigid hierarchies of seniority. The complexities of custom, as well as the many forms of authority in a boarding school, are virtually impenetrable to the outsider. Children cannot hope to share what this experience is like, even when safely back at home. While at school, they have to cope with demands on their loyalty from a multiplicity of sources. The teachers have far more power than they would at a day school, while at the same time being oddly discounted by the children, because they are not part of the crucial world of the peer group. Here is Lambert attempting to explain these bizarre power dynamics.

"The staff in the boarding school is a world of its own – and one where the conventions of behaviour and attitude, the controls used and the system of status may differ markedly from that laid down by the official system, and with considerable effect on it for good or ill. The children always have their own society too – with its own unwritten codes of conduct and values, handed down to each new generation and modified by each generation; its own system of controls for enforcing these codes; its own pecking-order of power and status (which may conflict strongly with that of the school – a boy with high power and status among his peers often never attains it in the official school hierarchy); its own élite groups, outcasts and divisions; its own culture, rituals, subterranean activities and private language; its own compensations and way of regarding and even using the staff and that other, official, world for its own purposes."

Despite his clarity, I still suspect that what he is talking about is only accessible to someone who has been through the system – which Lambert, all credit to his skill, apparently had not himself experienced as a child. Such mysterious internal workings are the special territory of institutions, and especially of those which may lie in store for the ex-public school man: the regiment, the bar, the House of Commons and the gentleman’s club. It will come as no surprise to readers that many of these institutions are themselves terribly old-fashioned and beset with an idiosyncratic conservatism which amuses foreign onlookers. They are of course the homes from home for ex-boarding gentlemen, and peculiar to Britain.

The major difficulties in community life are the lack of privacy, and the tendency for the group to indulge in scapegoating. The deprivation of privacy is arguably worse for children who grow up in the west where there is a strong tradition of privacy, compared to those who grow up in tribal or village communities where privacy was never on the agenda. Some boarding school survivors find their solution to the problem of privacy by eschewing communities ever after.

In the next chapters we look at what happens when the lack of privacy – particularly in a single-sex school – collides with the exhilaration of puberty, and with the prevailing repressive attitudes towards sex, the body, and vulnerability. It is time to think more closely about sex, sexual abuse, and bullying.