Author's Note 3: 'You're not allowed to cry'

My boarding school split-self

I thought it would be easy to dash off a post about what I meant when I referred in the Introduction to the Drying Rooms to my ‘boarding school split-self’. Well, it’s not easy.  It’s taken me days of brooding, pacing and staring at a computer screen. Trying to nail it down is driving me nuts. It’s not as simple as saying I developed a survival veneer of successful self-confidence and social ease. This is the classic posh, privileged boarding-school type, and I’m one of them. But, aside from an underlying vulnerability and neediness, something darker, deeper and more fucked up lurks at the heart of me. I could bang on about somehow not feeling inside my own life; or I could rephrase that and say that sometimes, often, I feel as if I am watching my life through a CCTV monitor; or I could try to express it via the metaphor of how I wear a simulated real-self suit that even convinces me. Except when it leaks.

But none of this is quite right.

What I’ve said above and what I’m writing about in my memoir The Drying Rooms is very subjective. For a more objective, researched view, I recommend the groundbreaking work of Nick Duffell, Joy Schaverien and journalist/broadcaster Alex Renton.

‘My studies show that children survive boarding by cutting off their feelings and constructing a defensively organised self that severely limits their later lives. David Cameron, Boris Johnson et al tick all the boxes for being boarding-school survivors. … Prematurely separated from home and family, from love and touch, they must speedily reinvent themselves as self-reliant pseudo-adults. Paradoxically, they then struggle to properly mature, since the child who was not allowed to grow up organically gets stranded, as it were, inside them.’

Nick Duffell, The Making of Them: The British Attitude to Children and the Boarding School System, 2000 (the above quote is from a Guardian article he wrote in 2014)

‘Many boarders adopt unconscious coping strategies, including dissociative amnesia resulting in a psychological split between the ‘home self’ and the ‘boarding school self’.  This pattern may continue into adult life, causing difficulties in intimate relationships, generalised depression and separation anxiety.’

Joy Schaverien, Boarding School Syndrome: The psychological trauma of the ‘privileged’ child, 2015

The title of Alex Renton’s book, Stiff Upper Lip, sums up the first rule that he and countless others learnt at boarding school: ‘you’re not allowed to cry’. He also talks of the ex-boarders who told him that they ‘accepted the regime, the rules, the rituals and the humiliations: they made the best of them, grew healthily and, by their own accounts, happily. They had learnt the important lesson: ‘feelings got you into trouble and were best kept hidden.’

But he goes on to say:

Supporters and critics of the system will never agree over whether the happiness was genuine or merely a necessary adaptation without which the child would not cope.’

Alex Renton, Stiff Upper Lip: Secrets, Crimes and the Schooling of a Ruling Class, 2017 

‘You learnt to be who you had to be.’  This was said by an ex-boarder in The Making of Them, directed by Colin Luke. Watching little boys becoming who they had to be in front of my eyes, in this compelling TV documentary shot in 1994 in a boys’ boarding school, had me sitting rigid on my sofa for the full 40-minute duration.

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