Author's Note 7: Homesickness

In other words

The Drying Rooms, the memoir I’m serialising here on Substack, is a work in progress and so am I. In writing (and reading) about boarding schools, I am coming to think that homesickness is the root cause of what I have been calling my split-self.

In the documentary The Making of Them, there is a scene early on when a tearful new boy is spotted by some other, bigger boys. They crowd round him. ‘Are you homesick?’ they ask. ‘No,’ says the little boy.

‘Are you homesick?’ 5-minute clip from The Making of Them, 1994

In his book, also called The Making of Them, Nick Duffell, who appears in the documentary, makes the following observations about sessions he ran with groups of men, all of whom were ‘boarding school survivors’ (his term).

Many said that it felt like weakness or betrayal to admit that they had suffered. Sometimes people were not sure what had happened to them or if it had been bad, but they retained a sense of having lost something.

It was as if there existed among many men who had been away to school an unspoken bond of recognition, which differed from the popular image. It was not about self-confidence, inner discipline, leadership, elitism, team spirit or loyalty, though many had an intimate relationship with those qualities, rather a sense of being somehow wounded.

‘Homesickness tore at the entrails,’ writes Fraser Harrison in his memoir Trivial Pursuits. When I read that sentence it literally took my breath away. Because it’s true. And because I’d wish I’d written it myself.

Alex Renton, author of Stiff Upper Lip, a groundbreaking book exposing the widespread culture of sexual abuse at boys’ boarding schools, describes his eight-year-old self:

…lying with the pillow hard over my face to stifle the snuffles of homesickness

This all-too-real trope of not just homesickness but having to suppress it, appears again and again in novels, memoirs, films, and psychological studies of the effects of boarding school. I well remember muffled tears in the dormitory, mine included. I also remember the disbelief that my homesickness didn’t have the power to perform the miracle of my parents coming to take me away. Alex Renton voices what he, and I, and so many ex-boarders know only too well:

As the child gives up hope of rescue … their energies turn to coping and survival.

Fraser Harrison again:

[Homesickness] had infected my bloodstream, and returned again and again to lay me low. In a sense, I have never been cured.

I too, in a sense, have never been cured. Homesickness metastasizes, leading to what I have always thought of as a kind of split-self. Similar to the effect of long term boarding from a young age that Fraser Harrison describes:

[as if] a fissure had opened up, a crack within my mind, which split it like a geological fault from the crust to the very core of my being. I became – and still am – a divided person, and although I have sometimes managed to seal over the gap, it has never been a true join.

This ‘splitting’ is encompassed in what Joy Schaverien has termed ‘boarding school syndrome’. Her book Boarding School Syndrome, about the ongoing psychological effects of boarding, was a revelation for me.

Schaverien reframes homesickness as bereavement. Here is some of what she says:

The term homesickness does not do justice to the immensity of the grief suffered by the child in this moment of loss. The profound anguish of this separation is actually bereavement, but it is not treated as such.

[This] rupture in their primary attachments is devastating for some young children. Following that, the unremitting nature of the experience dawns with the realisation that their parents are not returning …The state of loss at this time is often unspeakable…. Children in such a state are unable to make sense of the experience.

Children of whatever age have to prematurely appear grown up. Part of this is the imperative not to express feelings, such as sadness, with tears. … [They] learn to live cut off from their internal emotional turmoil. Homesickness is thus an important component in the creation of Boarding School Syndrome. The term might well encompass many forms of feeling sick: sick with fear, sick with grief, and sick with loneliness and loss. It is not uncommon for the repressed distress to emerge in symptoms such as bed-wetting and vomiting.

Bedwetting, of course, is particularly poignant for me. In The Drying Rooms, I write about my recurring memory of Cruel Matron making me wash my sheets in front of the other girls. I still have terrifying and humiliating dreams that feature urine (such as squatting naked beside overflowing bowls of piss in public places); I’d do anything to avoid sharing a room with anyone other than immediate family because it fills me with anxiety. Why? Because it feels a bit like the fear of ‘being caught’; it’s also the fear of disturbing someone else’s sleep; but, the truth is, it’s actually a fear of embarrassment and humiliation. Even when I have someone to stay in my own house (where there’s only one bathroom), I dread any type of exchange in the night when I am not wearing my ‘social’ skin. All my life, I have dismissed this as absurd, something I should just ‘get over’, a silly self-conscious flaw in me that is of my own making. I still think this. But, when I first read the following passage by Joy Schaverien, I was gripped. Yes! I thought. That’s it! Isn’t it?

Punishment merely adds to the child’s terror and confusion. The shame of the child made to wash his or her own sheets and bedclothes, night after night, is common and humiliating. … A child who reverts to bed-wetting in such circumstances is expressing profound suffering. This is serious neglect at a formative time. Thus the child may eventually learn to ignore her or his own needs and desires. This is a factor in the formation of Boarding School Syndrome; the child learns that her or his real self is unacceptable. It is safest to keep hidden.

And on the homesickness triggered by the back-to-school feeling (in my case, the moment of boarding a flight as an ‘unaccompanied minor’, or being returned to school on a Sunday night after a rare weekend out with my parents), like Fraser Harrison, ‘I felt an anguish on those return journeys I have very seldom felt since.’

Schaverien nails it when she discusses the Sunday-evening-return effect on one of her ex-boarder clients. The following passage hit me in the gut:

He briefly had the care and attention of his parents only to lose it again. [He] was incredulous that, after these outings, they would take him back. Each time he was returned to the school his disbelief turned to despair and ultimately to a dreadful resignation. In the process he lost touch with himself.

I recently read an article by Thurstine Bassett, co-author with Nick Duffell of Trauma, Abandonment and Privilege, in which he puts the case that homesickness should be renamed school sickness, as that is its breeding ground. Whatever it is, it is a form of loss first lodged in the heart of a child.

In a discussion on the Channel 4 News about successful ex-boarders (e.g. several British Prime Ministers), Joy Schaverien cautioned the others to note, ‘Somebody who is a successful adult may be carrying a bereaved child within them.’

There is so much more to say on this topic. Your thoughts are welcome.

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Note: one of the schools featured in the documentary The Making of Them (see clip above) is the prep school, Maidwell Hall. The same Maidwell Hall that Charles Spencer (brother of Princess Diana) writes about in his memoir, A Very Private School, published recently. It’s a very upsetting read. In addition to being miserably homesick, he had to endure brutal abuse at the hands of the then headmaster and was coerced into having sex with the assistant matron. Maidwell Hall is due to close this year.

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References

The Making of Them, a BBC ‘40 Mins’ documentary, directed by Colin Luke, 1994, YouTube

Harrison, Fraser, Trivial Disputes, 1989

Renton, Alex, Stiff Upper Lip, 2017

Schaverien, Joy. Boarding School Syndrome: The psychological trauma of the 'privileged' child, 2015

Duffell, Nick & Bassett, Thurstine , Trauma, Abandonment and Privilege: A guide to therapeutic work with boarding school survivors, 2016

Duffell, Nick. The Making of Them: The British Attitude to Children and the Boarding School System, 2000

Bassett, Thurstine, ‘Reflections of a Survivor’, Self & Society | Vol.46 No. 1 Spring 2018

Spencer, Charles, A Very Private School, 2024

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