I was at a boarding school from the age of eleven to eighteen. My parents were posted throughout my childhood to several different countries, so I spent my early years being taught in local convents or international community schools. Boarding school was to provide educational stability in my secondary school years. It certainly did that. But it denied me experience in the real world… I spent my formative years in a protected bubble… and felt at an acute disadvantage when I finally left, despite having received a privileged education. I felt naive and lacked confidence. Nevertheless, my memories of boarding school are mainly happy ones and I was treated kindly. I didn’t experience any cruelty - the only person who intimidated me was the headmistress, who taught Latin. She was known for hurling the board rubber across the room at you, if you got an answer wrong. I gave up Latin for German quite quickly! Several of the friends I made I am still in close contact with, more than 50 years later. They were my family of course, throughout my time at school.
However, the overriding memory for me, was excruciating homesickness. The first two years at school I only saw my parents during the Christmas and summer holidays, when I would fly unaccompanied to Singapore - a journey at that time that involved several stops en route. To this day, whenever I go through Singapore airport (which I did two weeks ago), that feeling of excitement and longing to be reunited with my Mum and Dad hits me in my solar plexus! I almost look for them at the airport! I am sure that those separations have affected me at a deep level. Sure, I learnt resilience and independence but there’s a fragility within that remains. Reading the Drying Rooms, Emma, has helped throw some light on that fragility. Thank you.
Since reading this, your Singapore moment keeps flashing up in my mind. So well described. That desperate excitement and longing to be reunited with your parents is visceral. And the way it reignites in your body every time you are in Singapore airport! It makes me happy that you basically had a good time at boarding school and made lasting friends. I'm not surprised. My own 50-year friendship with you is hugely important to me. People often say that going to boarding school at 11 is completely different to going at 8, but the homesickness is no easier at 11. I think homesickness alone and its knock-on effect throughout our lives is at the heart of so much of our vulnerabilities and needs.
Thank you for everything you've shared and aired. I haven't read all of the 'drying rooms' chapters because I've been cautious about stirring up too much - boarding school was over 50 years ago and I'm glad many of my memories have faded. Your writing has sent me on a journey though since we 'met' (virtually) in January 2024. My boarding school experience was buried. I was keen to 'do well'. For the 5 years I was there I came top of the class and was selected for all the school sports teams. I learnt how to be independent (I understood that to be the main thing I was expected to gain from the experience) and to this day I value my independence above all else. Unlike Gisu I never made any friends or attachments that continued beyond the day I left. In my 20s & 30s I was a passionate and effective advocate for diverting other children from institutional care and custody. I understood I was 'privileged' and I consciously distanced myself from my social class in every choice I made.
Through connecting with your writing, I have in this last year come to understand how my internal world has been indelibly shaped by 'boarding school syndrome.' Throughout my life, close attachments provoked intense anxiety that I've masked as best I could. Masking hides the wound but doesn't heal it! So last Autumn I decided to explore the connection between these two things with a therapist who is aware of 'boarding school syndrome'. It is early days but I am so enjoying what is emerging - my relationship with my (grown up) children has relaxed and deepened to become more fully enjoyable and heartfelt as I learn to trust that I am safe to be attached and vulnerable. Priceless - and proof that it is never to late to grow!
You’ve touched on so many interesting things in this, Issy. Thank you. Not least that ‘hiding the wound doesn’t heal it’. I’m so glad that reading The Drying Rooms contributed to your impetus to explore more about the effects of having been to boarding school yourself. I too am discovering that it’s never too late to grow.
I am Emma’s sister. Thank you, beloved sister, for The Drying Rooms. I have been an avid fan and follower of every post, and I am so proud of your bravery and steady tenacity in doing it. It is also full of beautiful true writing. The abuse you suffered however, is very distressing to think about. You were a sunny freckled seven-year-old, bursting with life when you went to that school. You were then systematically abused by an adult who had tremendous power over you. This is a terrible trauma to carry around. I am ten years younger than Emma. I was sent to the same boarding school she went to. When I was sent, our parents by that time were living in Iran. When I first arrived at the school, I was desperately homesick and wrote a letter to my parents every day begging to be allowed to go home to Tehran and to go to school there instead. I would walk every day down the narrow lane that led from the girl’s dormitory to the red post box, to post my letters of despair. I refused to make friends. During breaktime I would sit under a tree near the main school building with my blue anorak pulled tightly around me, warding off any child who approached me. This went on for about a year I think, and then I made a friend. I don’t remember how the friendship came about. But I remember the deliciousness of going with my friend to the small, sweet shop in the village near the school. We would buy Mars Bars and ice-cold cans of Coke and sneak into the drab television room of the girl’s dormitory to eat and drink and watch afternoon soap operas. The friendship didn’t last long. We both moved on to other people a couple of years later, but in my memory that friendship was the border between a period of misery, and something easier to bear. Emma’s terrible matron was long gone by the time I got to the school, and I was not systematically abused in my early years at the school by any adult, although there were spells of what I remember as cruelty. One teacher forbade me from going ‘home’ to London to see my brother for the weekend once as a punishment. I cannot now remember what I had done to deserve this. But I lived for going to see my brother at the weekend. I hated that teacher, and I knew very well that he did not like me. He wore a monocle. I still feel angry when I think about his stupid face with his monocle in it. When I graduated from the school years later, we were supposed to shake all the teachers’ hands as we filed out of our last assembly. I refused to shake his hand because I still hated him for that incident that had happened so many years before. But there were kind teachers too. And teachers with deep intellects. My history teacher at that school introduced me to the beautiful complexity and contingency of history in a way that is still with me to this day.
Thank you for this vivid account, beloved sister. Obviously, it's particularly powerful for me because I remember you being miserable at boarding school so well! I could feel it vicariously and longed to fix it for you, but couldn't. We've discussed these periods in our lives so often and I always treasure your insights both into the effect it had on you but also on me. I remember the positive influence the history teacher had on you and how that has seeped into your professional life. My equivalent was one of the English teachers when I was a teenager. There is no doubt in my mind that his teaching (and kind, thoughtful personality) nurtured my interest in literature and the writer in me.
I have a little story that I enjoy telling my own children, about life in the same school as you attended and here it is...
At our tea-time meal, we sat on tables of ten. there was always a plate of sliced bread in the centre of the table and there were always eight slices of white and two slices of brown bread. At the time, most children were used to eating white bread, rather than brown: I'm not sure if the brown was wholemeal or just brown in colour. My friends and I wanted the white bread, to the point where we were grabbing a slice, even before we had taken our seats, certainly before grace had been said. Boys' Matron, who was strict, but not cruel, spotted what was going on and she made some of us stay behind at the end. What she did, to punish us, was perfectly reasonable and, with hindsight, I admire her wisdom. She gave each of us a piece of the brown bread and told us we must eat it all. We were given the choice of eating it dry, or with margarine: I chose the latter, even though it was hard margarine, {the sort that, nowadays, you'd reserve for baking}. I bit into my brown bread, chewed it and, as I tried to swallow it, found myself retching. There was nothing wrong with the bread, of course, it was just my indignation and sense of injustice. It was as though Matron was trying to poison me! several times I swallowed, brought it back up, and swallowed it again. Eating that single slice of bread, brown bread that, nowadays I'd actually have chosen over the tasteless white bread, took me around ten minutes. I think that even Matron began to worry that she was going to have to clear up a mess! Finally, I successfully finished the last mouthful and I was allowed to rejoin my friends, the other guilty boys having finished their brown bread much more quickly. What it's taught me, as a life-lesson, is that eating, and the circumstances in which eating happens, have a big effect on the palatability of the food!
Thanks for sharing this visceral food experience, Jon. It's clearly so vivid for you after all these years. I can picture our school dining room with a little boy (you) sitting at a table struggling with that slice of bread. I wonder if the childhood memory of gagging on food as punishment is a memory now consigned to our generation ... I hate to think of this happening to small children now, although you seem to have processed it in a generous spirit.
I have enjoyed reading about you boarding school experiences and your close relationship with your family members. As you know, I was sent to a convent in Berkshire far away from Donegal where my mother was based and to which my colonial father came from looking after farms in Kenya. I was 11 and the first of my younger siblings to go to what my mother thought was an unnecessarily snobby religious school - she was not Catholic and wanted me to go to an excellent day school in Derry. I was very homesick and was helped because my peers were kind and we all jogged along together and avoided too much attention from the nuns. I think we were all aware that some of the nuns were quite unhappy either in their vocation (some had joined from school) or in teaching. And I regret to say they were fastened on for ridicule. There was a wonderful Austrian nun, Sister Cecily, who was the organist and taught piano who were learned had been Jewish and converted to escape Nazi persecution and escaped Vienna because of this. She taught me and I enjoyed her lessons so much but she was mocked for her accent and her fastidiousness. She was also a physicist and much more intellectual than some of the other nuns who were cloistered in their safe world of admiring the old Catholic recusant families some of the girls came from (like the Fitzalan Howard family related to the Duke of Norfolk). I look back and laugh at all our preoccupations which were so socially naive yet we were being groomed to pray that through us the world would become Catholic (we prayed for those Communists in Russia in the 1960s). Good luck with the closing chapters!
This is fascinating, Angelique. Thank you. Thank goodness for the camaraderie that comes with having kind friends looking out for each other. Even though we were all so young and powerless, there's something deeply comforting about the collective bond of loyalty between children in the face of scary, powerful, often unhappy adults. I love your description of Sister Cecily. I'm glad she had you as an un-mocking fan of her teaching. As a teacher myself, there's nothing better than a pupil enjoying a lesson and learning from it. It must have been a boon to her.
The series of stories that you have provided has led me to recall memories of that same time and place that I shared with you from the age of 8. So, as you have asked for other contributions, here is a short one…
I was lucky to have arrived at school to the care of “Kind Matron” and not “Cruel Matron” who presided over the girl’s wing. Kind Matron, Myfie, retired two years after my arrival. She was stooped but warm and generous. She lived in a small bedsit room along the same corridor as our dormitories into which we were invited occasionally to watch TV. I recall being crowded in that small room to watch Winston Churchill’s State Funeral. One day a week we also watched Top of the Pops and The man from U.N.C.L.E. So, we were cared for and valued. Did I like school at that time? Well, I arrived, from Kenya, after an overland trip through Sudan, Egypt and Europe and then holidays with grandparents in England and Wales and so school started as the culmination of a long journey and was taken as part of that big adventure. I remember Myfie taking myself and a new girl in hand as my parents left without me for their return trip to Kenya. What I didn’t know at the time was that my mother had some sort of nervous breakdown after having to leave me at Bedales, and my older sister at Ashford School for girls, and so had to miss her flight home. So, the trauma of separation was all hers and not mine. Subsequently those three departures a year for school terms were much less pleasant and I really did dread those days and the life of a boarding school, albeit a generally kind and safe place and therefore unlike some of the stories one hears about some other English public schools.
Clearly, each child at that time had very diverse experiences depending on their home life, whether they were in the girls or boys wing and how they fitted in with their peers. I was lucky in that I seem to have fitted in reasonably well, although I was picked on for being smaller than most and for supporting the Kenyan runners at the Tokyo Olympic Games instead of the Brits. Stupidly for social reasons, I ended up supporting other countries in other events and almost anybody but the Brits as by that time, two months into my first year at school I was missing Kenya and did not want to be in this foreign country at school anymore. I was ready to go home.
This is so moving, Hugh. I remember the boys' 'Kind Matron' so well. I wish she'd been my matron. 'Cruel Matron' also let us watch TOTP and Man from U.N.C.L.E, although I have a strange feeling I might have joined you - the boys - to watch that, at least on one occasion. Maybe when Kind Matron was commissioned by Cruel Matron to gouge out my verruca . But what really moves me is you as a little boy making that incredible overland journey from Kenya to boarding school in England, and your subsequent homesickness and your loyalty and longing for the place that was home. In your case, it sounds like Home was very much bound up in a specific place - Kenya. In my case I just ached to be with my parents in what has become over the years a sense of home that is bound up in smells, sounds, heat, and the safety of familial love. Thank you, too, for sharing the trauma that your mother experienced after leaving her children at boarding school. Heartbreaking.
I have enjoyed reading your book Emma. Your writing is very powerful and wonderfully evocative ❤️
As you know I went to a French school, run by nuns in Tehran. I loved my time there and to this day I have friends around the world whom I met at Ecole Jeanne d’Arc when I was six.
One day when I was 8 the teacher asked me to take a bundle of marked exam papers to the office for her
(not sure why I had to do that!) I was so keen to please her and be back in the class quickly that I ran across several interconnected courtyards. Unfortunately I fell in some deserted corner and one exam paper slid under my shoe and was so badly torn that the writing was no longer legible. I still remember the sense of panic that rose in my chest. Without thinking I gathered all the papers, put the damaged paper on top of the pile, folded the bundle and handed it to the secretary without a word. I naively thought they wouldn’t notice it! Later the teacher asked me if I had had an accident during my errand and I had to confess.
I don’t know what mark the pupil was given in that exam. I always told myself that with the benefit of the doubt she must have been given 20/20!!!
I love this story of eight year old you in that school in Tehran, Gisu. It’s not just fascinating as a historical glimpse of pre-revolutionary Iran, but it’s so touching. I can really see that little girl and feel her anxiety! It warms my heart thinking of you being taught and cared for by those kind nuns - and still having old school friends spread out across the globe.
I was at a boarding school from the age of eleven to eighteen. My parents were posted throughout my childhood to several different countries, so I spent my early years being taught in local convents or international community schools. Boarding school was to provide educational stability in my secondary school years. It certainly did that. But it denied me experience in the real world… I spent my formative years in a protected bubble… and felt at an acute disadvantage when I finally left, despite having received a privileged education. I felt naive and lacked confidence. Nevertheless, my memories of boarding school are mainly happy ones and I was treated kindly. I didn’t experience any cruelty - the only person who intimidated me was the headmistress, who taught Latin. She was known for hurling the board rubber across the room at you, if you got an answer wrong. I gave up Latin for German quite quickly! Several of the friends I made I am still in close contact with, more than 50 years later. They were my family of course, throughout my time at school.
However, the overriding memory for me, was excruciating homesickness. The first two years at school I only saw my parents during the Christmas and summer holidays, when I would fly unaccompanied to Singapore - a journey at that time that involved several stops en route. To this day, whenever I go through Singapore airport (which I did two weeks ago), that feeling of excitement and longing to be reunited with my Mum and Dad hits me in my solar plexus! I almost look for them at the airport! I am sure that those separations have affected me at a deep level. Sure, I learnt resilience and independence but there’s a fragility within that remains. Reading the Drying Rooms, Emma, has helped throw some light on that fragility. Thank you.
Since reading this, your Singapore moment keeps flashing up in my mind. So well described. That desperate excitement and longing to be reunited with your parents is visceral. And the way it reignites in your body every time you are in Singapore airport! It makes me happy that you basically had a good time at boarding school and made lasting friends. I'm not surprised. My own 50-year friendship with you is hugely important to me. People often say that going to boarding school at 11 is completely different to going at 8, but the homesickness is no easier at 11. I think homesickness alone and its knock-on effect throughout our lives is at the heart of so much of our vulnerabilities and needs.
Thank you for everything you've shared and aired. I haven't read all of the 'drying rooms' chapters because I've been cautious about stirring up too much - boarding school was over 50 years ago and I'm glad many of my memories have faded. Your writing has sent me on a journey though since we 'met' (virtually) in January 2024. My boarding school experience was buried. I was keen to 'do well'. For the 5 years I was there I came top of the class and was selected for all the school sports teams. I learnt how to be independent (I understood that to be the main thing I was expected to gain from the experience) and to this day I value my independence above all else. Unlike Gisu I never made any friends or attachments that continued beyond the day I left. In my 20s & 30s I was a passionate and effective advocate for diverting other children from institutional care and custody. I understood I was 'privileged' and I consciously distanced myself from my social class in every choice I made.
Through connecting with your writing, I have in this last year come to understand how my internal world has been indelibly shaped by 'boarding school syndrome.' Throughout my life, close attachments provoked intense anxiety that I've masked as best I could. Masking hides the wound but doesn't heal it! So last Autumn I decided to explore the connection between these two things with a therapist who is aware of 'boarding school syndrome'. It is early days but I am so enjoying what is emerging - my relationship with my (grown up) children has relaxed and deepened to become more fully enjoyable and heartfelt as I learn to trust that I am safe to be attached and vulnerable. Priceless - and proof that it is never to late to grow!
You’ve touched on so many interesting things in this, Issy. Thank you. Not least that ‘hiding the wound doesn’t heal it’. I’m so glad that reading The Drying Rooms contributed to your impetus to explore more about the effects of having been to boarding school yourself. I too am discovering that it’s never too late to grow.
I am Emma’s sister. Thank you, beloved sister, for The Drying Rooms. I have been an avid fan and follower of every post, and I am so proud of your bravery and steady tenacity in doing it. It is also full of beautiful true writing. The abuse you suffered however, is very distressing to think about. You were a sunny freckled seven-year-old, bursting with life when you went to that school. You were then systematically abused by an adult who had tremendous power over you. This is a terrible trauma to carry around. I am ten years younger than Emma. I was sent to the same boarding school she went to. When I was sent, our parents by that time were living in Iran. When I first arrived at the school, I was desperately homesick and wrote a letter to my parents every day begging to be allowed to go home to Tehran and to go to school there instead. I would walk every day down the narrow lane that led from the girl’s dormitory to the red post box, to post my letters of despair. I refused to make friends. During breaktime I would sit under a tree near the main school building with my blue anorak pulled tightly around me, warding off any child who approached me. This went on for about a year I think, and then I made a friend. I don’t remember how the friendship came about. But I remember the deliciousness of going with my friend to the small, sweet shop in the village near the school. We would buy Mars Bars and ice-cold cans of Coke and sneak into the drab television room of the girl’s dormitory to eat and drink and watch afternoon soap operas. The friendship didn’t last long. We both moved on to other people a couple of years later, but in my memory that friendship was the border between a period of misery, and something easier to bear. Emma’s terrible matron was long gone by the time I got to the school, and I was not systematically abused in my early years at the school by any adult, although there were spells of what I remember as cruelty. One teacher forbade me from going ‘home’ to London to see my brother for the weekend once as a punishment. I cannot now remember what I had done to deserve this. But I lived for going to see my brother at the weekend. I hated that teacher, and I knew very well that he did not like me. He wore a monocle. I still feel angry when I think about his stupid face with his monocle in it. When I graduated from the school years later, we were supposed to shake all the teachers’ hands as we filed out of our last assembly. I refused to shake his hand because I still hated him for that incident that had happened so many years before. But there were kind teachers too. And teachers with deep intellects. My history teacher at that school introduced me to the beautiful complexity and contingency of history in a way that is still with me to this day.
Thank you for this vivid account, beloved sister. Obviously, it's particularly powerful for me because I remember you being miserable at boarding school so well! I could feel it vicariously and longed to fix it for you, but couldn't. We've discussed these periods in our lives so often and I always treasure your insights both into the effect it had on you but also on me. I remember the positive influence the history teacher had on you and how that has seeped into your professional life. My equivalent was one of the English teachers when I was a teenager. There is no doubt in my mind that his teaching (and kind, thoughtful personality) nurtured my interest in literature and the writer in me.
I have a little story that I enjoy telling my own children, about life in the same school as you attended and here it is...
At our tea-time meal, we sat on tables of ten. there was always a plate of sliced bread in the centre of the table and there were always eight slices of white and two slices of brown bread. At the time, most children were used to eating white bread, rather than brown: I'm not sure if the brown was wholemeal or just brown in colour. My friends and I wanted the white bread, to the point where we were grabbing a slice, even before we had taken our seats, certainly before grace had been said. Boys' Matron, who was strict, but not cruel, spotted what was going on and she made some of us stay behind at the end. What she did, to punish us, was perfectly reasonable and, with hindsight, I admire her wisdom. She gave each of us a piece of the brown bread and told us we must eat it all. We were given the choice of eating it dry, or with margarine: I chose the latter, even though it was hard margarine, {the sort that, nowadays, you'd reserve for baking}. I bit into my brown bread, chewed it and, as I tried to swallow it, found myself retching. There was nothing wrong with the bread, of course, it was just my indignation and sense of injustice. It was as though Matron was trying to poison me! several times I swallowed, brought it back up, and swallowed it again. Eating that single slice of bread, brown bread that, nowadays I'd actually have chosen over the tasteless white bread, took me around ten minutes. I think that even Matron began to worry that she was going to have to clear up a mess! Finally, I successfully finished the last mouthful and I was allowed to rejoin my friends, the other guilty boys having finished their brown bread much more quickly. What it's taught me, as a life-lesson, is that eating, and the circumstances in which eating happens, have a big effect on the palatability of the food!
Thanks for sharing this visceral food experience, Jon. It's clearly so vivid for you after all these years. I can picture our school dining room with a little boy (you) sitting at a table struggling with that slice of bread. I wonder if the childhood memory of gagging on food as punishment is a memory now consigned to our generation ... I hate to think of this happening to small children now, although you seem to have processed it in a generous spirit.
I have enjoyed reading about you boarding school experiences and your close relationship with your family members. As you know, I was sent to a convent in Berkshire far away from Donegal where my mother was based and to which my colonial father came from looking after farms in Kenya. I was 11 and the first of my younger siblings to go to what my mother thought was an unnecessarily snobby religious school - she was not Catholic and wanted me to go to an excellent day school in Derry. I was very homesick and was helped because my peers were kind and we all jogged along together and avoided too much attention from the nuns. I think we were all aware that some of the nuns were quite unhappy either in their vocation (some had joined from school) or in teaching. And I regret to say they were fastened on for ridicule. There was a wonderful Austrian nun, Sister Cecily, who was the organist and taught piano who were learned had been Jewish and converted to escape Nazi persecution and escaped Vienna because of this. She taught me and I enjoyed her lessons so much but she was mocked for her accent and her fastidiousness. She was also a physicist and much more intellectual than some of the other nuns who were cloistered in their safe world of admiring the old Catholic recusant families some of the girls came from (like the Fitzalan Howard family related to the Duke of Norfolk). I look back and laugh at all our preoccupations which were so socially naive yet we were being groomed to pray that through us the world would become Catholic (we prayed for those Communists in Russia in the 1960s). Good luck with the closing chapters!
This is fascinating, Angelique. Thank you. Thank goodness for the camaraderie that comes with having kind friends looking out for each other. Even though we were all so young and powerless, there's something deeply comforting about the collective bond of loyalty between children in the face of scary, powerful, often unhappy adults. I love your description of Sister Cecily. I'm glad she had you as an un-mocking fan of her teaching. As a teacher myself, there's nothing better than a pupil enjoying a lesson and learning from it. It must have been a boon to her.
Thank you Emma,
The series of stories that you have provided has led me to recall memories of that same time and place that I shared with you from the age of 8. So, as you have asked for other contributions, here is a short one…
I was lucky to have arrived at school to the care of “Kind Matron” and not “Cruel Matron” who presided over the girl’s wing. Kind Matron, Myfie, retired two years after my arrival. She was stooped but warm and generous. She lived in a small bedsit room along the same corridor as our dormitories into which we were invited occasionally to watch TV. I recall being crowded in that small room to watch Winston Churchill’s State Funeral. One day a week we also watched Top of the Pops and The man from U.N.C.L.E. So, we were cared for and valued. Did I like school at that time? Well, I arrived, from Kenya, after an overland trip through Sudan, Egypt and Europe and then holidays with grandparents in England and Wales and so school started as the culmination of a long journey and was taken as part of that big adventure. I remember Myfie taking myself and a new girl in hand as my parents left without me for their return trip to Kenya. What I didn’t know at the time was that my mother had some sort of nervous breakdown after having to leave me at Bedales, and my older sister at Ashford School for girls, and so had to miss her flight home. So, the trauma of separation was all hers and not mine. Subsequently those three departures a year for school terms were much less pleasant and I really did dread those days and the life of a boarding school, albeit a generally kind and safe place and therefore unlike some of the stories one hears about some other English public schools.
Clearly, each child at that time had very diverse experiences depending on their home life, whether they were in the girls or boys wing and how they fitted in with their peers. I was lucky in that I seem to have fitted in reasonably well, although I was picked on for being smaller than most and for supporting the Kenyan runners at the Tokyo Olympic Games instead of the Brits. Stupidly for social reasons, I ended up supporting other countries in other events and almost anybody but the Brits as by that time, two months into my first year at school I was missing Kenya and did not want to be in this foreign country at school anymore. I was ready to go home.
This is so moving, Hugh. I remember the boys' 'Kind Matron' so well. I wish she'd been my matron. 'Cruel Matron' also let us watch TOTP and Man from U.N.C.L.E, although I have a strange feeling I might have joined you - the boys - to watch that, at least on one occasion. Maybe when Kind Matron was commissioned by Cruel Matron to gouge out my verruca . But what really moves me is you as a little boy making that incredible overland journey from Kenya to boarding school in England, and your subsequent homesickness and your loyalty and longing for the place that was home. In your case, it sounds like Home was very much bound up in a specific place - Kenya. In my case I just ached to be with my parents in what has become over the years a sense of home that is bound up in smells, sounds, heat, and the safety of familial love. Thank you, too, for sharing the trauma that your mother experienced after leaving her children at boarding school. Heartbreaking.
I have enjoyed reading your book Emma. Your writing is very powerful and wonderfully evocative ❤️
As you know I went to a French school, run by nuns in Tehran. I loved my time there and to this day I have friends around the world whom I met at Ecole Jeanne d’Arc when I was six.
One day when I was 8 the teacher asked me to take a bundle of marked exam papers to the office for her
(not sure why I had to do that!) I was so keen to please her and be back in the class quickly that I ran across several interconnected courtyards. Unfortunately I fell in some deserted corner and one exam paper slid under my shoe and was so badly torn that the writing was no longer legible. I still remember the sense of panic that rose in my chest. Without thinking I gathered all the papers, put the damaged paper on top of the pile, folded the bundle and handed it to the secretary without a word. I naively thought they wouldn’t notice it! Later the teacher asked me if I had had an accident during my errand and I had to confess.
I don’t know what mark the pupil was given in that exam. I always told myself that with the benefit of the doubt she must have been given 20/20!!!
I love this story of eight year old you in that school in Tehran, Gisu. It’s not just fascinating as a historical glimpse of pre-revolutionary Iran, but it’s so touching. I can really see that little girl and feel her anxiety! It warms my heart thinking of you being taught and cared for by those kind nuns - and still having old school friends spread out across the globe.