"Keep your feelings to yourself – spare us the embarrassment!"

Lambert goes on to describe this conventional anti-emotions stance. I quote him at length.

Until recent decades, emotional display was not readily witnessed at home, for the upper-middle-class parent avoided the real chores of bringing up sticky babies and preserved a public self ‘in front of the children’.

"Single-sex boarding schools cannot officially provide their children with an emotional life; what there is must be hidden and furtive, and both the school and the boy world discourage the display of emotion and the revelation of deep feeling, as this makes people vulnerable. Instantly, one can become the target for gossip and in such societies the deeper the feeling the quicker and deeper the hurt. Hence some boys grow up with an inability to communicate real emotion, a fear of it in many forms, an acute sense of embarrassment at the sight of it in others, and a preparedness to accept relationships with others only within certain limits. Some have an inability to make deep affective relationships, and are keenly aware of this. It can cause them considerable distress, as does their ignorance of how to handle deep emotional situations. It is not only a question of deliberately imposed self-control, of the conscious stiff-upper-lip. A minority of public school boys find that they cannot act in any other way, they are affectively neutral and worry because of it."

Here Lambert gets right to the point, and what he says is extremely serious. In hindsight, observing my own process of adjustment, I think that I coped with the double-bind by killing two birds with one stone: I began to disown my family along with my feelings. In other words, I tried to pretend to myself that I didn’t have parents, so that I couldn’t miss what I didn’t have. My emotions clearly had to be disposed of anyway, like everyone else’s. This disposal of parents was encouraged by the fact their visits were few and short, and life at home – known as ‘the hols’– seemed increasingly a minor episode in my life.

For my real life actually happened at school. It was punctuated by the visits to what I contrived to call home, but which became ever more alien. At some level, I never got back home again, and always felt a stranger in my family’s house. Some people fared much worse than I. Boarding school children by definition lose contact with their homes, but even the concept of home can get lost when a child is shunting backwards and forwards in the transitory world, and it might never be regained. A woman participant on one of our workshops put it succinctly:

"I never came home, I don’t know what that is."

For me, like so many others, the visits home, or holidays, began and ended with unpacking and packing my trunk and tuck box. We may imagine the trunk as a kind of portable schoolboy coffin, the tuck box as his secret symbol of love. For the depth of feeling – elation at the end of term, and misery at the end of the holidays – are too much for a child’s body to contain. Feelings get stored in the tuck box at the back of the heart – unlocking them is more painful than putting them away. This problem has to be solved. Everything pointed me to one obvious solution: to cut off home and feelings with the same blow. Not that this was done as a conscious decision, of course not. But the one inside, who protects and guides a child towards survival, could be said to have made a wise choice, on the face of things. And the process of growing up seems to affirm the choice. Looking back to my teenage years, spent largely at my public school, I recognise that the inevitable search for my own identity was accelerated by there being no apparent need to separate from my parents, since I had already cut them away. This was of course an illusion, because I had not really separated, rather I had amputated them from my sense of myself, in order to not feel the loss. In that sense it was a false separation, a compensation which meant that I would have to revisit that area later on if I wanted to complete it.

I now understand how difficult it is to achieve a healthy separation from parents if it has not been allowed to happen in its natural course. I suspect that a natural separation would occur some time just after the onset of puberty. In most of the ancient societies, who were more wise about these things than we, there would be proper rites of passage to mark the transition from childhood to adolescence and into adulthood. These would be a central part of both the child’s education, and the life of the community. The initiate would be handed on from the family unit to the larger unit of the community and to the more specific one of gender, the man’s lodge or the woman’s. This would doubtlessly have been done with pride, respect, and celebration – not with silence, insoluble double-binds, and the constant fear of humiliation.