The idea of being ‘the-only-one-who-cannot-take-it’ powerfully effects the personality of the child and the subsequent adult in a specific way. It strengthens a vicious double-bind which can be seen to operate both on children and parents. In his delightful autobiography, Trivial Disputes, Fraser Harrison, writing of his first days at prep school, describes this double-bind with precision:

If he [the new boy] is to survive being sent away from home, he must develop the ability to do without their affection, at least for the time being. And to achieve this he must either cease to feel any affection on his side or split himself off from his feelings, suspending them until they can begin to flow painlessly again.

The loss of affection and the consequent cutting of from feeling is a rapid and often irreparable amputation. Journalist David Thomas, remembering his school days, in a review of the television film The Making of Them in the Telegraph, 6 January, 1994, makes the point.

"The first lesson I learned about boarding school life is that if you want to survive being deprived of your parents’ affection then you have to persuade yourself that you did not need it in the first place. Herein lies the great flaw in the public school system. In many ways prep schools are idyllic places. They are usually in the country. You can play football and cricket and make huts in the woods. But what you cannot do is love. You can’t love your parents because it hurts too much. And you most certainly can’t love your fellow-pupils because there is an overriding taboo against any hint of homosexuality. So, after a while, you just get out of the habit of loving. As I dare to say many of those Boarding School Survivors – not to mention their wives – will testify, getting back into the habit can be a very difficult task".

In the initial stages, most children simply want out. Apparently, for the first year or so, I wrote letters home begging to be taken away, which clearly caused my mother a deal of misery. And in my secret world, stimulated no doubt by the current literature and films about brave Tommies escaping from the Nazi POW camps, I remember endlessly fantasising about running away. But as Fraser Harrison points out:

"The double bind was a python with many more coils …. They had, after all, sent me away from home, which was bad enough; what might they do to me if I made a fuss? It could only be worse. And anyway I wanted to please them, not to irritate them … I was frightened of losing their love by telling them how much I needed it."

This situation spells calamity inside the mind of the child. It cannot be tolerated without some immediate adjustment. And what a powerful sentence that last one is – how familiar it is to the English. Has not our literature been rooted in the pathos of what happens when people are unable to express their feelings for each other?

I think that there is another even more vicious twist to Harrison’s python. It is one which operates from the very basic survival logic of the child. We may imagine that the child has to work out an answer to the difficult question: “If they love me, why did they send me away?” He will very likely have already been supplied with a few answers, such as “it will make a man of you”, or “it’s for your own good.” But it is a complex question, and one which involves the child in the first of many mental acrobatics, so expertly mastered by the double-life characters we were following earlier.