My response to this invisible suffering was to reason that I was the only one with this debilitating weakness. That made me feel extremely vulnerable. As a child, however, I did not even have the concept of vulnerability. I had no idea that there might be others who thought that they also were the only ones who were ‘weak’. But what I never doubted for a moment, though it was not till much later that I understood how it worked, was the threat which the other children represented. This was apparent at each and every moment, for we lived within a herd mentality. Alliances and friendships were formed and could be changed instantly, according to how the social wind in the group blew.

We organised ourselves in groupings where those who had been longer at the school had progressively more status – unless their behaviour gave them away. Physical size and cutting wit were qualifications which could make you more popular and more safe. You were not meant to like the school, but you certainly were not allowed to miss your parents. You were not supposed to cry – unless the group wanted to make you cry through some humiliation or bullying. In which case they, and of course we, because everyone will have joined in the persecution at times, were extremely capable of doing so. All in all it was a perfect atmosphere in which to develop the skills of the seen-and-not-heard child. Here is Tom, hero of the famous Tom Brown’s Schooldays, advising new boy Arthur:

"Don’t you ever talk about home or your mothers and sisters … or they’ll call you home-sick or mama’s darling."

Such advice to the new boy has been unchanged since the beginning, witness this eight year-old prep school boy, quoted by Lambert, in The Hothouse Society:

"If a boy cries everyone laughs at him or goes away because he is a baby and very wet."

It is easy to see now, with hindsight, that having lost our parents and being thrown into that ‘dog eats dog’ environment we were all caught up in the need to survive. But of course then I thought the problem was just me, that I was childish, that I was not tough enough to not feel the desperate longing to be taken home and away from this jungle, which had not turned out to be the way I had been told it was going to be. Now I know that many children will have felt exactly the way I did – personal failures, or weaklings. Many of those who have written to us, or who have done our courses, have experienced some immediate relief to know that they were not alone in feeling like this. This relief comes after a lifetime of believing that they were the only ones who had felt bad, and were therefore one of ‘life’s failures’ – a phrase often used by boarding-school enthusiasts to humiliate those who have turned out to be against the convention of sending young children away. Those who are aiming for this sore spot know what an easy target it is, since they will also have been desperately guarding against ‘failure’ and ‘weakness’ in themselves.