School Days

Before I tell you about myself, I ought to fill you in about my
parents and hopefully you'll understand where I'm coming from and I
hope you'll wish me well with where I'm going to&;#8230;

My unlamented father served in the Merchant Navy and was evidently a
high-flyer as he first captained a ship whilst still in his thirties,
shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. However, his first
command didn't last long as, one day in late 1939, a German U-boat
surfaced alongside his vessel and gave the crew five minutes to get
into the lifeboats before sinking the ship with torpedoes. Two years
later the German navy had become less humanitarian and sank his second
ship without warning; unlike many of his crew my father survived,
albeit with the loss of one of his legs and in my generous moods I
sometimes think this incident was perhaps responsible for his
eccentricities in later life, although (in my less generous moods)
being such an obnoxious git was maybe the way to become a leader and
ambassador for Britain in those days. He never went to sea again and
grew into a caricature of a sea captain with his limping gait and
bluff, hearty manner.
My mother was the kind of semi-moronic half-educated woman who would
pass as the fragrant rose of the Empire in pre-war Middle England, and
she was in complete awe of the ridiculous old buffoon throughout her
life. They somehow managed to produce the one offspring rather late in
life and I was born just after the mid-century.

From early years I was admittedly a bit of a handful and I was often at
the receiving end of a good hiding from the old seadog whilst mother
twisted her handkerchief and fretted. Being part of a non-existent
extended family meant that my social skills never developed and I found
it hard to make friends both at nursery and junior school, having a
tendency to clown around and get into trouble to gain peer approval. My
school reports were far from good, so when I was around ten years old
my father came up with one of his inspirations, which was to send me to
boarding school. I must explain that we lived near Portsmouth and there
were at that time a fair few boarding schools in the area specifically
geared to the privileged children of naval families. They tended to
have certain things in common, such as a head teacher entitled Captain
Headmaster (or Headmistress), an over-propensity towards corporal
punishment and surprisingly low fees on account of the general
decrepitude of the premises and the fact that they couldn't attract
decent teachers because of the low wages they offered. Not surprisingly
their sales pitch was the formation of character rather than academic
achievement.
"I've found just the place," he boasted one day, "I reckon it's time
someone took you in hand and made a man of you, har, har, har!" he
chuckled at his own wit. My mother just smiled weakly and consigned me
to the worst years of my life.

The school had bad drains, bad food, bad teachers and some downright
evil students. Not that they all started off that way; most of the
lower forms were anxious huddles of timidity and insecurity but as they
progressed through the school the scum rose to the top, was creamed off
and given prefects' badges. The school had belatedly realised that we
had entered the twentieth century some sixty-odd years ago and prefects
were no longer allowed to actually beat pupils, but that was no barrier
at all to the machinations of these latter-day inquisitors. They were
always eagerly seeking minor miscreants to inventively punish, some
going in for humiliation (being hung upside-down from a banister, for
example) and others for suffering, such as the Special cross-country
course which included a field full of gorse and bramble and another
which was inhabited by a bull; a prefect always followed on a bicycle
and watched from the road to make sure you weren't taking any short
cuts. A few brave souls refused to comply, preferring instead to be
reported to the Head. The Head was a kindred spirit with my father,
seeing the country for which they had risked their lives going daily to
the dogs and determining to fight a rearguard action against
indiscipline and insubordination, and being put on a prefect's report
meant a visit to the Head's office and an encounter with a long and
swishy cane, but at least the Head was (hopefully!) acting out of a
sense of duty and not malevolent fun. Then there was the school Matron,
an equally fearsome character with a bristling moustache and no bedside
manner whatever; she would slather ointment on your throbbing botty if
requested, but most pupils rather feared her tender administrations as
being somewhat pervy and put up with the pain. Talking of perviness, I
was determined to show my father that he was wasting his money on my
exclusive education (which, of course, he was) and wound him up during
the holidays by declaring my fervent admiration for rock stars such as
Mick Jagger and Jimi Hendrix, knowing that he hated the Stones on
account of their loudness and upfront sexuality and Jimi simply on
account of his being black.

Needless to say, I was never considered prefect material, did the bare
minimum of school work and when I was finally allowed to leave I did so
with hardly any qualifications; today this would rightly be considered
a scandal and a disgrace, but in those days an education at an
independent school was seen as an end in itself and many less
discerning employers favoured people from the "right" background even
if they were complete boneheads, so surprisingly I found it
comparatively easy to get a job - for a while. What I found difficult
was to keep a job; my bad experiences at school had created a fear of
discipline such that if anything went even slightly wrong in a job I
would quit on the spot rather than face the mildest rebuke. However,
this caused severe scenes at home, with my father ranting and raving
about wastrels and dossers and my mother sobbing quietly in the
background - but I had endured these domestic scenes for years whereas
I just couldn't take the normal risks inherent in meeting people in new
situations. I became unemployable, anxiety-ridden and insular and it
wasn't long before I was in and out of psychiatric care.

Fortunately this turned out to be the low point in my life and I was
about to turn the corner; just when it seemed that things could get no
worse my father keeled over mid-tantrum and dropped dead; the
full-strength Capstans had done for him in the end. It then turned out
that the miserable old sod had been squirrelling away quite a sum of
money over the years and my mother was, if not rich, at least
comfortably off. She took a new interest in life, invested her money
sensibly whilst, for the first time in her life, enjoying inexpensive
little luxuries. She lived for another ten years and it's fair to say
that we developed a relationship of forgiveness and even love; I don't
think either of us had ever felt loved before. In fact, love came
running after me with a vengeance, as it was during this period that I
began to correspond with Pat, a nurse at the psychiatric hospital who'd
shown me a lot of compassion and understanding when I'd been verging on
the suicidal. We met and began to go out together; Pat saw me through
the dark periods when I developed unreasonable jealousies or feared
that our unlikely relationship was based on a cruel bet or a monstrous
joke such as my old school prefects would pull.
We were married in the same year as Prince Charles and Lady Di, and I
believe I got the better deal; we produced two smashing kids, a girl
and a boy, and are still together. Pat is now a senior nurse and I've
been to day classes and have developed information technology skills
which allow me to run a small business; we don't really need the meagre
income this generates, but I desperately needed to show that I could be
good at something. I haven't been near a psychiatrist for nearly twenty
years.

Bearing in mind my appalling childhood, you'll probably be astonished
to hear that we have spent quite a bit of our inherited wealth in
sending our children to boarding school. All that I can say is that
things have changed a good deal since I was young; the dilapidated
hovel in which I was miseducated has long since been demolished and our
own kids attend a modern co-ed school with lavish IT investment,
well-equipped laboratories and outstanding sports facilities. For
instance Zoe, who's fifteen and rather an outdoors type of girl,
recently wrote home to say that she had returned from sport battered,
bruised and soaking wet; before I penned a letter of complaint, she
also made it clear that it was entirely her choice to take the option
of white-water rafting (thanks for winding me up!). Philip, on the
other hand, is thirteen, quiet and studious; he's hoping to do five
language GCSEs including Japanese. During school holidays we spend a
lot of time together as a family - I'd hate them to think boarding
school was a place to dump troublesome kids, as of course it was for
myself. Pat and I will often sit with the kids on a beach, in the
garden or round the fire, depending on the season, and chat about our
lives, and it's seldom that a holiday passes without the request:

"Tell me again what things were like in your horrible school, Mum!"