40. I had the misfortune of getting the worst of both worlds.
Prep school, from 6-12 was a nightmarish place where it was still 1935 - masters from my time there are now in prison with good reason. Corporal punishment was a daily fact of life - a caning was a relief compared to some of the options.
Secondary school - in the shell, we were made to fag, and prefects were permitted to issue corporal punishment, which happened frequently. Nothing testosterone-fuelled about it - cold and calculating. “You will convene at 5am at the oaks in full uniform”, and then whatever horrors they could come up with. Ski squats that would go on for hours. Standing outside at night in soaked clothing. The occasional good old fashioned beating. In my remove year it was decided that shells were too young for the heavy duty of fagging and it could be damaging to them - so the removes did it. In the fifth form they abandoned fagging and replaced it with “fifth form house duties”.
You learned to live under utterly arbitrary rules.
By the time we were in the sixth, duties were phased out and replaced with hired staff, and corporal punishment - in fact any prefect-meted punishment whatsoever - was banned in response to an incident involving cricket bats that resulted in a pupil being hospitalised for quite some time. Well, that and the law finally mandated it.
My kid brother went there, starting a year after I left, and had a markedly different experience. En-suite showers! We had a frigid communal shower for my first two years, never mind en-suite. It’s like we went there a century apart.
That all said, by the time I was at secondary school it was all old hat - there was a marked difference between the boys who started boarding with secondary school and those who had been through prep school - we were the wise old hands, the lifers, the ones who knew the grift. Prep school, I find it hard to talk about.
Turns out there’s a term for this stuff - “Boarding School Syndrome”.
Prep school, from 6-12 was a nightmarish place where it was still 1935 - masters from my time there are now in prison with good reason. Corporal punishment was a daily fact of life - a caning was a relief compared to some of the options.
Secondary school - in the shell, we were made to fag, and prefects were permitted to issue corporal punishment, which happened frequently. Nothing testosterone-fuelled about it - cold and calculating. “You will convene at 5am at the oaks in full uniform”, and then whatever horrors they could come up with. Ski squats that would go on for hours. Standing outside at night in soaked clothing. The occasional good old fashioned beating. In my remove year it was decided that shells were too young for the heavy duty of fagging and it could be damaging to them - so the removes did it. In the fifth form they abandoned fagging and replaced it with “fifth form house duties”.
You learned to live under utterly arbitrary rules.
By the time we were in the sixth, duties were phased out and replaced with hired staff, and corporal punishment - in fact any prefect-meted punishment whatsoever - was banned in response to an incident involving cricket bats that resulted in a pupil being hospitalised for quite some time. Well, that and the law finally mandated it.
My kid brother went there, starting a year after I left, and had a markedly different experience. En-suite showers! We had a frigid communal shower for my first two years, never mind en-suite. It’s like we went there a century apart.
That all said, by the time I was at secondary school it was all old hat - there was a marked difference between the boys who started boarding with secondary school and those who had been through prep school - we were the wise old hands, the lifers, the ones who knew the grift. Prep school, I find it hard to talk about.
Turns out there’s a term for this stuff - “Boarding School Syndrome”.