Something like the following may be running through the boarder’s mind during his first few hours, weeks, or months, and then sinks and becomes something not thought about again. The thought may never get actually verbalised or put together in this way, but nevertheless, I have heard enough stories from people about how they actually felt about being sent away, to believe it to be fairly universal. In generalised terms it could be expressed something like this:

"I know Mummy and Daddy love me. They have told me so. I know it’s important to them to send me away to school and that it costs a lot of money and that I should be grateful. But I hate it. If they love me, why did they send me away?"

"Either they don’t love me or there’s something very wrong with me for feeling like this. If they don’t really love me it must be because I am bad. If they do, and I feel like this, it must be because I am bad."

However he reasons, if he wants to retain a sense of having parents, the child has to come up with the notion that he is either bad or unlovable or both. This is a classic double-bind, a lose–lose situation that is very hard to get out of. So how do children deal with this? My answer is that they rapidly construct a Survival Personality to protect them. It is strategically orientated and builds on the social skills already developed. The human spirit is amazingly creative, and there many different ways that children cope with problems. What determines the precise way that children solve such difficult questions and adapt seems to be due partly to who they have become in their family of origin, partly to how they read the particular circumstances they find themselves in, and partly to the mystery of nature. Who knows ultimately where children get their particular tendencies, character structure, and degree of willpower?

I think that many children in the grip of this boarding double-bind do in fact decide that they are somehow terribly flawed, and build their bewildered inner world around a very low self-image. Outwardly, this self image may well be clothed in the self-reliant successful – if brittle – front that they are supposed to adopt. But their inner world is a secret, and they are now perpetually on guard. Many never regain an ability to trust others, and their self-confidence is a fragile affair. If these people are ‘life’s failures’ then there are many of them. Yet we as a nation have a curious relationship with this syndrome, since traditionally we seem to admire the values of modesty and self-deprecation above all, and consider them somehow peculiarly English virtues. Here we have a further reason why it is so hard to notice the problem of boarding school survival.

If some children harbour the secret of their ‘failure’, then others set out with absolute determination to deny its existence, to succeed, to become ‘Winners’, and will go to any lengths to achieve this. The schools provide endless outlets for such ambition, since competition and grading feature in all activities, even for those of six, seven and eight. This is doubtlessly done in the spirit of ‘cultivating excellence’, but often it is pursued with a curious fanaticism. And of course, where there are winners there must be losers. All this differentiation provides more scope for increasing the rivalry, hostility and cruelty amongst the children. The need not to appear a failure can become utterly chronic.

There are many ways in which children deal with the bewilderment of being sent away and arriving into this highly charged atmosphere. Some are driven by revenge, and others decide to keep a low profile, or to be nice, or a fool. Some, God help them, find their niche by being sex objects, or the butt of others’ scapegoating. We shall look at this in more detail later. However, the first step for all concerned in surviving the double-bind is dealing with feelings. Feelings are unwelcome in the school, but they have all too often already been discouraged by the family, since both school and family are underpinned by the same attitudes concerning the non-rational, which we discussed previously. What could be less rational than emotions? Distaste for emotion is consistent, and promoted by children, parents and staff alike. Here is the advice of a boy of sixteen at a public school, quoted by Royston Lambert: