Lockdown and Boarding school

Lockdown and Boarding School

The tiresome cliché is that prison holds no terrors for anyone who has been to a British boarding school, at least of the type prevalent up to the late C20. It would be trite to adapt the cliché for the current lockdown, but I’d like to stand it on its head. Certain aspects of the lockdown, far from being immunised by a boarding school experience, insidiously recall some of the traumas of that experience.

At the age of 8 I entered the domain controlled by the owner of a small preparatory school. About 60 boys, aged 8-13, were boarded in a sometime country house, of little architectural beauty, set in large grounds, including lawns, woods and playing fields, near the Hertfordshire Chilterns.

That first arrival was a time of extreme helplessness and misery, although, as therapists that have explored this topic note, the child has no words for most of this. The only thing it is consciously aware of is here is the beginning of a “new normal” way of life. Nonetheless it is likely that the child feels fundamentally abandoned by its parents and, at the same time, on the threshold of the school, a fundamental terror of what is to come. At worst, what is to come may indeed include terrors of bullying, punishment, or abuse. In any event it will include biting loneliness and seeming (or actual) arbitrary and incomprehensible fearsome authority. And this will go on and on, for what is for the child an endless time, with no communication except, in those days, by censored letter.

There is a parallel buried here. Suzanne Moore in The Guardian (14^th April) wrote: “We comply to the lockdown as rational beings, but the subconscious rebels”.

For me, I believe that the subconscious has disinterred some of the childhood experience of boarding school, in particular the feelings of helplessness and abandonment, even if in the latter case there no longer exist actual parents to do the actual abandonment. Perhaps our loveless and unprepared government stands in here.

These feelings were the more acute because I have left my home (as I did then) to live in someone else’s home (as I also did then). More, in this house there is a floor for a couple of lodgers, who effectively and by agreement live as separate households. When I first arrived, I too was “lodged” in an empty room on this floor. Was there an association with dormitories, or even, given the present viral circumstances, with the sick bay of school? At various times I was confined there with chickenpox and measles- the latter especially a dangerous and debilitating disease, which I remember affecting eyes and my sense of smell.

The effect, in the early days of the lockdown, was to encourage the small, frightened, abandoned boy to re-emerge, however rationally one embraced the new reality alongside everyone else.

April 2020