My mother, however, had been away for most of her schooling. Her cultural expectations more naturally included having her own children at boarding school. She had apparently loved her time. It was, she told me, with what I took to be excitement and conviction, “the best days of your life”. However, it was not until she was in her seventies and my father had died that she acknowledged her abiding memory to be one of fear. But in those days she fed me on tales of midnight-feasts, pillow fights, the exciting atmosphere of the school railway carriage on the first day of term, and the strangeness of being evacuated to Wales at the outbreak of the war. To this diet I added what I had gleaned from comic strips inspired by Frank Richards, with names like ‘Forbes of the Fourth’. In these the hero was constantly engaged in adventure, either vanquishing the despicable bully in the boxing ring, or trapping a band of robbers during half-time in the vital football or cricket match, in which he was starring.

The reality of my experience turned out, of course, to be quite different. The atmosphere of school was certainly tense, if not exciting, particularly at public school. The tension was not due to adventure, for the lack of free time and the unending ritual of daily routine meant that life could be experienced as utterly boring, if there had been time to think about it. Rather, the tension came from the need for constant vigilance, out of pride and self-protection, to keep your misery concealed and others off your back. I have already described my first parting, when my mother fled from her own tears, which would doubtless have embarrassed me too. I suspect most of us suffered from the enforced separation, and yet I cannot remember seeing the signs of it. Nor were there signs of general homesickness in my contemporaries, though we constantly complained together about school and counted the days until the current sentence (which is how we viewed each term) had been served. But we did not show each other our sorrows, and this for most of us, will have become the habit of a lifetime.