Notes on Revisiting My Boarding School

I.

For over nine years, half a century ago (1964-1973, from age eight to age seventeen), I was at boarding school in the same English village, at Felsted, a school founded in 1564 - and which I revisited today. The first ten of these photos show three buildings: of which one (white plaster and timber - photos 1, 2, 3) dates from 1564: that was the original school, founded as a charity school (hence the name “public” school) by a former Lord Chancellor of England, who established almshouses in Felsted at the same time. (In our day, this old school housed the half-timbered art rooms.) The second building (one of the boys’ houses, named Deacons, photos 4, 5, 6) and the third (the school chapel, photos 7, 8, 9, 10) were opened exactly four centuries later, in my second term at the junior school, in 1964. I claim no special architectural merit for them; but, on returning to the school today, I note that they still seem part of my nervous system.

The next photograph (11) shows the façade of the main school house; the following three (photos 12, 13, 14) show a rogues’ gallery of “distinguished” Old Felstedians in which I’m startled and flattered to be a part. Photograph 15 shows Jenny Stephens, herself daughter of a Felsted housemaster, and a student at the school in 1971-1973: she acted with me in productions of Peter Schaffer’s Black Comedy (1971) and Sophocles’s King Oedipus (1972). Finally, three photos (16, 17, 18) show, again, the school’s Victorian central building and the cricket pitch onto which it faced.

I’ve always found it easy to laugh about Felsted School’s history. “We” were founded in 1564 by surely the most unredeemed creep in English history, Richard Lord Rich (1496-1567). (Correct nomenclature should demand that he be either Richard Rich, as he began his career, or Lord Rich, as he became. To us, however, he was almost always known as Richard Lord Rich.) He emerges consistently from histories of the Tudor era, from A Man for all Seasons (play and film), and from the Wolf Hall trilogy and all the Shardlake novels as a sinister and treacherous Machiavel; he contributed to the downfall of others (Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell) until he himself reached the top, managing to serve Protestant and Catholic monarchs along the way (Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, Elizabeth I). And “we” produced the worst ruler in English history: Richard Cromwell (1626-1712), son of Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell fils did so poorly in his late father’s post as Lord Protector of the Realm in 1658-1660 that the nation soon decided it would be better to go back to having a monarchy after all.

Every Whit Sunday, we were asked to pray for Richard Rich’s soul. When we thought of the crimes and treacheries he had committed, we did. (It’s just possible that, at the end of his life, he began to advocate the integrity he hitherto had lacked. The motto he gave the school was “Garde Ta Foy”: “Keep Your Faith”. He had changed faith himself; I suspect he finally came to appreciate the value of constancy.) The “summer” term of 1964 was an inspiring and entertaining time for me to arrive at Felsted School: I was eight years old but already wild about history, new to a school celebrating its four hundredth anniversary - and the world was also celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of the birth of William Shakespeare, to whose genius I had already begun to awaken. I had been brought up in conservative circles. To feel that Shakespeare and Felsted School had both been conserved and preserved for four hundred years was enough to make me feel I was entering rich traditions. A massive large-scale play about the school’s history - known as “The Pageant” - was staged in the open air at the end of my first term: I thought it the most marvellous event imaginable.

II.

Today, I have the mixed feelings about the English boarding schools of my youth that you might expect. Still, in reading Alex Renton’s excellent (and admirably researched) book on English boarding schools, Stiff Upper Lip: Secrets, Crimes, and the Schooling of a Ruling Class (2017), I’m relieved to find that the Felsted of my experience had few of those schools’ most alarming features and that I was one of the boys to whom the school did (I tentatively believe) more good than harm. Today, I arrived with the feelings of apprehension and anxiety that many of us experience on returning to an institution that seemed designed to instil conformism; I left with much new laughter, old memories of friendships, and pleasure in friendships renewed.

When I think how long we boys went without seeing our parents in those years, and how unthinkingly reactionary the school climate often was, I still object strongly to boarding school. It taught us the self-possession that was the most crucial asset of this rigorous education, a self-possession that often seemed achieved by keeping us apart from our parents. It also exposed me to aspects of class snobbery and racism that I had never been conscious of at home with my parents. (I should add that our schoolboy values were thoroughly confused. While I learnt the snobbery of such words as “common”, and listened to other boys relating jokes about kaffirs and Polacks - words new to me - I and others looked up to Martin Luther King as an inspiringly eloquent hero; we were deeply shocked by his assassination.) It appals me now to remember - it appalled me then to discover - that, although our first term at prep school (I was eight) was called one of “grace”, our second term (I was now nine) was known as our “bashing-up” term: this was a term of more or less institutionalised bullying, when other boys released all their aggression (mainly verbal) on us. (If the staff knew of this tradition, they neither encouraged nor banned it.) Some boys were so cheerful or placid that they suffered little then, but they were surely a minority. What was most terrifying was simply the advance prospect of that bashing-up term, for which many boys arrived in a state of extreme alarm. (I can still see them in my mind’s eye, desperately entreating their parents to help them. Mine had told me to say “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me”: which was soon disproved as boys reduced me to tears.)

But Felsted was not, in my time there, a school where corporal punishment was sadistically indulged; not a school where bullying ran amok; not a school where boys were sexually abused by masters or, as far as I know, raped by other boys; and not a school where junior boys were treated as the prostitutes of senior ones. Renton’s book has alarming examples of all these; Felsted’s past had included instances of both disturbing corporal punishment and bullying. I can think of one Felsted schoolmaster who could be considered to have come close to sexual abuse, but I have never heard that any boy suffered; I hope none did. (We were aware that the master in question was sexually excited by certain boys; yet he seemed not to overstep the boundary that separated his reaction from abuse.) Another, more obviously gay, master seemed to treat all the boys with friendly respect and without any sign of taking advantage of us. A third master, interestingly subversive in several ways, seems not to have abused any boys - but then, when one of those former pupils stayed on, at age eighteen to nineteen, for a year as an assistant master, this master turned one drunken dinner into an occasion for taking disturbing sexual advantage.

The most bizarre - egregious - case of sexual abuse by staff was heterosexual. At the Junior School, one exceptionally attractive matron, herself perhaps only twenty years of age, would visit the boys’ dormitories at bedtime and would allow or encourage advanced flirtation from boys between ages eight and thirteen. One of the littler boys would stage tantrums unless she kissed him good night. One twelve-year-old boy was convinced she was the love of his life; she did too little to disillusion him. And it was widely reported that, with at least one thirteen-year-old (an Adonis), she often entered into situations of advanced snogging. Perhaps no boy was damaged by this nymphet - but was she damaged by letting boys use her for their need for love? I have often wondered.

Bullying surely exists in all schools. Still, at Felsted, I remember no institutionalised bullying after that second term at prep school. Any child with a keen nervous system will suffer from the verbal lashings of other children: within the rarefied atmosphere of boarding school, such episodes can cause hysteria or depression. There surely were such episodes at Felsted; since I developed a sharp tongue in those years, I’m often anxious to think that I must have made life unhappier for some other boys.

III.

The happy surprise of today, however, was to find how many of us were genuinely glad to recognise one another again, to inquire about shared memories and about post-school life. We realised that we had all liked one another, that we had not tormented one another, that we had cared about one another, and that we had shared - still share - a great deal of laughter. One man four years my junior has sometimes claimed that I changed his life when I was a prefect: by way of a punishment, I made him write an essay on painting. It was the wakeup call he needed at the right moment (his mother often thanked me): today, he is a successful professional artist. (In 2012, when helping to empty my parents’ house, I found his essay; I sent it to him.)

IV.

Perhaps today’s event was happy because we who attended are survivors. Some of those not present surely recollect school in grimmer ways. (Others have now died.) When I arrived at Senior School at age thirteen, we “nips” had to perform errands for prefects, several of whom we hero-worshipped. Some of those stars of our early-teenage firmament have gone on to do well in later life (one became a general, another joined M.I.6); but the most startling report I heard today was that the prefect I remember as most ruggedly heroic and remote - academically brilliant and an athletically excellent all-rounder - is said to have died, in middle age, of an auto-erotic asphyxiation experiment.

As the decades pass, it’s fascinating to note how memories change. In my years at Felsted Senior School (1968-1973), a conventional punishment given by prefects to junior boys was a cold bath. You were told to run the cold tap until the bath was full, and then get into the cold water - up to your neck - for anything between one second and two minutes. (The duration depended on the prefect.) But one of Felsted’s seven houses, Gepps, had a more barbaric variant, known as a “freezer”: boys being punished were required to sit in an empty bath with one foot in the plug hole and then switch on the cold tap, remaining there until the water covered their shoulders. To us boys in the other six houses, this was a legendary item of sadism that we could only imagine in horror. This century, I’ve met three of my contemporaries who evidently imagined it so vividly that they now swear they were given freezers too. I’m pretty sure they weren’t; and today I met a Gepps alumnus, older than me, who confirmed that those appalling freezers were exclusive to his house.

V.

In the term that I entered the Lower Sixth (September 1970) at age fifteen, a number of girls first arrived at Felsted, also entering the Lower Sixth; more followed the next year. The atmosphere of the school was transformed - relieved of its hothouse atmosphere. Several of those first three years of Felsted “girls” remain my friends after all those years. (Today the school is fifty per cent co-educational.) I have only ever attended one Old Felstedian dinner, just two weeks before the March 2020 lockdown: it honoured the fiftieth anniversary of the arrival of those girls, three of whom were seated at the same table as myself. (One of them, a devoted mother and grandmother with a happy marriage to a male Felsted contemporary of mine, has since died of cancer: my admiration of her is the more emotional now.)

On no area of school life are my feelings more perplexed and conflicted than my recollections of romance and sex, especially same-sex romantic longing and same-sex sex; and in this I must be at one with a high proportion of those who went through boarding school. Adolescence abounds in romantic emotion and sexual discovery anyway: send boys away from their parents to an institution where they are chiefly or solely exposed to other boys and you will intensify every sense of longing, even while the school and the culture does all it can to repress this. Some of this romantic/sexual feeling begins long before adolescence; I think I first began an inkling of my first gay crush on my very first evening at boarding school at age eight, surely because I was looking for a substitute for my mother’s love. There are people of both sexes who feel they have never again been so consumed by romantic love as they were at boarding school for another boy; they miss what they recall as the purity of that emotion, although the culture instilled in them the sense that it was deeply impure. Though I’m homosexual, I still have to edit away many of the feelings of homophobia and repression that began at school. I certainly knew intense and unrequited romantic love in those years that, in my head, seemed positively chivalrous as well as hopeless; I’m lucky that, as an adult, I went on to a few more serious forms of romantic love and many of requited sexual passion.

On a more important note, I was surely fortunate that none of my relatively few sexual experiences at school were with boys significantly older or younger. (I went to bed with one boy, the same age as me, once when we were thirteen, once when we were fourteen, and once when we were fifteen; the mood was pleasantly experimental. Over thirty years later, I met up with him: he was now a married man, but he made no denial of the immature sex that had happened between us. He cheerfully told me that, after “losing his cherry” at age sixteen to a girl in the school holidays, he had never looked back. In other ways, we now had little in common - our politics were and are far opposed - but our five years in common at Felsted gave us plenty to gossip about.)

Today, I saw one married man with a long record of intense heterosexual activity. As it happens, he acquired more homosexual experience at school than most gay boys, but it was never doubted that he would become the married heterosexual he is today. There are many such men, from many boarding schools: that was how they dealt with the horniness of those years. (I’ve often wondered how they recall their own early bisexuality, but I’ve been too timid to inquire.)

Other more profoundly bisexual or homosexual boys suffered more, many of them achieving less sexual fulfilment. I suspect there were some nervous breakdowns. In 1969, one senior boy was demoted from prefect status after romantic/sexual involvement with a younger boy threatened to become a scandal. (The senior boy in question now lives with a woman, though I understand he is not unscarred by the crisis. The younger boy is - of course - married with children; surely he, too, is also still scarred.)

A few other near-scandals were contained within the school without being known outside it or even throughout it. (Around age eleven, my best friend, now a grandfather, and I tried going to bed together once, more out of experimental curiosity than desire for each other. We were caught by the dormitory prefect and sent to the headmaster, a largely fair and well-liked man who gave us a routine punishment of “minus points” which we had to work off with helpful errands around the school. That, too, was a scandal, but not a traumatising one. We immediately understood that our activity was, by school standards, thoroughly illicit and wrong, but nobody considered telling us why.)

Adolescence abounds with these storms, but boarding school makes the emotional weather far stormier. And some of these scandals cast long shadows: I’ve no doubt that some of the repression that affected me well into adult life was the consequence of several of those crises, which spread alarm and confusion across the school’s atmosphere.

VI.

Deacons - the youngest house at the senior school where I spent the years 1968-1973 - was always known for its sporting emphasis, thanks to our housemaster, John Cockett, who died in early 2020 and whose memorial service I and my two brothers attended today. Yet, when it became known in February 1968 that I - intensely asthmatic, notoriously thin, and seldom able to play any sport - was considering applying to another house, Cockett made sure that I was given a tour of Deacons. He then urged me to come there, assuring me that Deacons could accommodate me. What atypical twelve-year-old schoolboy is not grateful for assurance that he won’t be a misfit? Cockett was as good as his word. In 1972-1973, without telling me, he did everything he could to exonerate me from some exams (I was often extremely ill at the time) and to pull strings for me to get to Oxbridge. I’m happy to say that my Cambridge college, to his vexation, refused his efforts (I took all the exams); but I’m always moved to know that he tried on my behalf.

Certainly Felsted seemed a school that tried to make us conform and be conservative. And yet a whole new music school was opened there in 1964. A few of my Felsted contemporaries pursued visual art in adult life, at least one of them, Bruce Munro, with international renown. Possibly I was the first professional critic to have emerged from the school, but Max Stafford-Clark and Sam Walters were among the theatre directors who did so. They and I were in school productions staged by Alan and Marion Ronaldson, an English master and his wife, a former actress: the Ronaldsons for decades won Felsted a reputation for presenting the best amateur theatricals in Essex. I learnt many aspects of stagecraft from the Ronaldsons, some of it highly outmoded by the time I became a theatre critic but nonetheless giving me a far keener instinct for stage performance.

The rural landscapes around the school became part of the mental climate of my painter contemporary and Deacons friend, Neil Paterson: he became, and remains, a landscape painter. I once returned to Felsted in my late twenties to see not my former schoolmasters but the views and gardens I had known for almost ten formative years of my life. In the event, I found several of those masters as well as the landscapes. And, when I reintroduced myself, with some diffidence, to the men who had taught me, explaining that I was now a dance critic, they expressed delight that I had not become one of the alumni’s too-many chartered accountants and corporate lawyers - the conformists. I was long remembered by most of them as the boy with the worst health, with acute and chronic asthma that confined me to the school sanatorium for periods each year and on three occasions for weeks in hospital; Felsted the institution was remarkably kind and tolerant to this wheezing but stubborn child.

A remarkable number of the staff remained in the village when they retired from teaching; it retained a touching sense of community. When I once, in my forties, called on two of those retired teachers - one male, one female - I mentioned my emotion about the Essex landscapes around the school: the male one replied “Yes, I find with the years that people matter less and views more.” The Ronaldsons, having directed me in successive school plays, rejoiced - and were fascinated - that I was now a London theatre critic.

Boarding school kept changing then; it continues to change. As a prefect in the late 1960s, my brother Jim explained to our housemaster Cockett that he refused to administer corporal punishment (when he was younger, at least one prefect had done so, with pronounced sadism); Cockett in due course abolished that. As a prefect in 1973, I in turn refused to punish boys with cold baths (the prefects’ standard punishment of the day): when Cockett asked why I was making boys write essays instead, I explained how unequal cold baths were, since one can bring a skinny boy close to passing out whereas a plump boy may almost enjoy one; Cockett said nothing at the time, but immediately abolished them once I had left the school.

Today’s boys and girls see (and go home to) their parents far more frequently than we ever did. (Surely this is the greatest improvement of all?) Many of their special needs are carefully considered as few of ours seemed to be. (Fifty years ago, who even knew what dyslexia was? In the last thirty years, two members of my immediate family have taught children with special educational needs, and at Felsted itself.)

Because I grew up in a rural part of the countryside where there were almost no children of my age in walking distance, I almost invariably enjoyed returning to boarding school: for me, it meant society. Then, at the end of every term, I looked forwards to returning to my family: it meant my parents, their love, and the many meanings of home itself. My brother Jim was far more homesick than I, but he, in due course, sent two of his children to boarding school because they, like he. were passionate sports-players (and because they could come home every weekend, as we could not). At some level, however, I was probably suppressing aspects of homesickness. Today, on recognising many houses on the way to Felsted, I registered each as a tiny remembered knot in my stomach.

It now seems objectionable to me that parents with money can buy a private education for their children that poorer people cannot. The sense of self-possession that boarding-school alumni project may seem enviable; but their not infrequent airs of entitlement, privilege, and condescension are often vile. (I still try to weed out some of the snobberies that I acquired then, mainly from other boys.) There always were, and surely are, many children for whom boarding school was wrong.

And I still object in memory to several features of what we endured. (The food was often atrocious. I often wonder what the official ingredients were of the recipe we nicknamed “Foreskin Pie.” Alex Renton relates how, after a boy at Eton committed suicide, a master asked the boy’s contemporaries what particular issues might have driven him to this end. One of them piped up, “Could it have been the food, sir?” That’s a classic anecdote of the gallows humour of English public schools. Yet I recall how truly shocked a visiting team of Etonians were by the awfulness of Felsted food. Till then, they had not known how relatively good Eton’s was.)

Today, however, has reminded me of many reasons to be grateful to Felsted. We laughed often then - sometimes with other examples of that gallows humour, but often because the teachers were affably good-humoured with us. Seeing today male contemporaries whom I had not seen since the 1970s was an occasion for more than mere bonhomie. We took real pleasure from each other again - and realised that we had done so then. As we emerged from this afternoon’s reunion/memorial tea, cricket was being played on the main pitch where it had been played since the nineteenth century. I was and am no cricket player; but since leaving Felsted, I have known many for whom it is one of life’s deepest sources of delight. I could only be heartened that it endures.

My brother Jim recalled today how the school’s chief rugby team had lost every single match for ages until his final year. He and another boy worked hard to turn that record around, winning the first match that year (and most of those that followed). Our mother had come to watch. He was thrilled she was there to witness this moment of victory. Having congratulated him, though, she told him “Now go and speak to the losing side. You know from experience how they must feel.” John Cockett taught him most how to play a match; my mother taught him most how to behave when a match was over. Both are vital elements of schooling. I have been very moved to revisit these old memories.

Friday 10 September, 2021