Replacing the family

I have been describing how I coped by psychologically ridding myself of emotional awareness and of the sense of myself as one who belonged in a family. Now this association of family and feelings may seem odd to some – considering that the average English family is not renowned for its ability to permit the expression of feelings. But whatever the family is like, it has been the place where the children belonged and were cared about. The need to be cared about and to belong does not end when children go away to school. All human beings have a profound and undeniable need to belong. Belong they will, for belong they must. The simplest way of achieving this under the conditions of boarding is to transfer the belonging needs from the family to the school. The nearest thing to the family is the peer group of children. A partial transfer always happens when children start or change school It is inevitable. Day-school children have and need their parents to bear witness to the change. For the boarder, however, the transfer has to be total. It is therefore more precarious.

Getting your belonging needs met by your peer group is always a risky business. You cannot demand it, you have to earn it in some way. This frequently involves betraying yourself, as the following story shows. In her first term, a girl walking ‘in crocodile’ (two by two) falls over. “I can see you won’t be an asset to the school”, chimes in her companion, already lost behind her false-self. Even though the girl considers this comment disgustingly snobbish and cruel, she needs to belong, and takes it on herself to try not be clumsy, to become an asset. It is a powerful wound, still remembered after twenty years. The price of belonging is clear – you have to become a thing, an asset. And then maybe you can belong.

The peer group imposes the conditions of belonging. It has its own code, and it is dedicated to maintaining it. In every school, in every house, in each year it will be slightly different. But one feature appears to be universal: no group wants a ‘cry-baby’. No members of the group want to be reminded of their own feelings which they have had to do without, nor of their own unfulfilled need to have a mother and father present. A certain hardness is inevitably cultivated, and the weak only have a place as scapegoats. Splitting off of feelings and family is effectively policed, most simply in the prohibition against ‘blubbing’. Once again, Fraser Harrison spells out the tragedy clearly and elegantly.

Our stoicism needed no promotion by the staff; it was one of those unwritten and virtually unspoken mores which nevertheless is fully understood by each member of the community. Everyone’s self respect was at stake: if one boy blubbed, the others would be poignantly reminded of their own unhappiness and brought dangerously close to blubbing themselves. He had therefore to be repressed at all costs. For most of us, who had mostly been raised in families where every little worry was drawn out and soothed, this was the beginning of that process by which our feelings were first numbed and then disconnected, giving us the distinctive quality of the boarding-school ‘man’. At all events something vital was killed off in me during this period which I have never been able to revive.

Though he says ‘repressed’ Harrison clearly means ‘suppressed’. The slip is an easy one to make. The external suppression of the problem-displayer by the group is matched and supported by the internal repression of all the group members. Each boarding school child must somehow survive the loss of the family and keep his feelings under wraps if he is not to become a spectacle to be ridiculed and bullied by his peers, or tormented by the chaos inside him. Therefore the answer is clear: mummies, daddies, warmth, safety, comfort, vulnerable feelings, pets, younger siblings, toys, own rooms, teddy bears, birthday cakes, freedom, love – all these things get lumped together with the family and are dispensed with, to take on a secret life of their own, somewhere deep inside the child.

Naturally, into the breach of missing parents, there step other substitute figures. In the boys’ schools father-figures are most readily supplied. At prep school these tend to be the headmaster, whereas at the larger public schools it is the housemaster who is responsible for the daily life of his charges. In addition, friendships and special relationships may develop between a boy and a particular master or even an older boy. In my day these did not have immediate paternal associations for us, although of course they were usually compensations for the lack of caring parents. These relationships could offer much, but they could be dangerous, for we were constantly, and with intense fascination, on our guard against the slightest suspicion of a homosexual scandal. We did not know the concept of sexual abuse, but we would always have imagined it to be our fault had ‘something happened’.