1. MarcT

    MarcT Active Member

    Joined:
    Aug 16, 2016
    Messages:
    206
    Likes Received:
    149
    Location:
    Buenos Aires, Argentina.

    Writing about life in a British boarding school

    Discussion in 'Setting Development' started by MarcT, Feb 22, 2017.

    For some time now I've been wanting to write about my experiences in the British boarding school system and now that I'm giving my other first draft a rest in the drawer, I finally got around to penning the first 2500 words today.
    I'm curious as to whether there is much interest in this subject. Maybe there could be be with Hogwarts et al, I don't know. There doesn't appear to be much non fiction available on this subject that I can find anyway.

    I'll be cramming in twelve years as I was sent away at the age of five (my brother was four) and (we) survived four different boarding schools, before finally escaping at age seventeen. By today's standards, our experiences were hair raising and, although I still have some issues lurking about, I find it incredibly easy to write about it and the words flow like a torrent.
    It's also cathartic, but I want it to be much more than that, certainly not a sob story, far from it. A truthful, no holds barred journey through the system, beginning, middle and end, with a detached emotional tone.
    I also intend to spice it up with brief flashes forward to significant events that happened later, that may or may not be related to those school days. I'll also be commenting on those pearls of wisdom that were often dished out and how they shaped the entire experience.
    Initially I'm writing it from a five year old's perspective in first person (I had considered second person) and the allusion to the size of everything...cars, trees, people, snowmen etc and that perspective or tone will change as the years pass.
    I'm not going to refer to real places or people, just general locations like country or maybe county, as it's not an expose or anything like that.
    I think the most significant aspects will be a confused sexual identity due to being locked away with other boys for so long, the us and them perspective (day boys/boarders/escaping) and the abhorrence of authority.
    Either way, I've made a start, but I'd certainly be interested to hear any views on the subject.
     
  2. Wreybies

    Wreybies Thrice Retired Supporter Contributor

    Joined:
    May 1, 2008
    Messages:
    23,826
    Likes Received:
    20,815
    Location:
    El Tembloroso Caribe
    Americans will love it. Though we we take great pride in our egalitarian eschewing of such decadent artifacts of class structure, there's a secret craving for it here. Denizens of New England still have similar schools (we call them prep schools here), but those aren't really the real thing. They aren't centuries old. They aren't steeped in traditions no one remembers the provenance of, and those that are are only mimicking the real thing from your side of the pond. Any wonder HP was such a smash hit here? ;)

    Just for clarity's sake, when you say boarding school, are you refering to schools like Charterhouse, Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Shrewsbury, etc?
     
  3. matwoolf

    matwoolf Banned Contributor

    Joined:
    Mar 21, 2012
    Messages:
    6,631
    Likes Received:
    10,135
    Location:
    Yorkshire
    [​IMG]Learn the lingo before you earn those Brit wings.
     
    Wreybies likes this.
  4. Wreybies

    Wreybies Thrice Retired Supporter Contributor

    Joined:
    May 1, 2008
    Messages:
    23,826
    Likes Received:
    20,815
    Location:
    El Tembloroso Caribe
    Is that a brand of what you lot call "brown sauce"? :)
     
    matwoolf likes this.
  5. matwoolf

    matwoolf Banned Contributor

    Joined:
    Mar 21, 2012
    Messages:
    6,631
    Likes Received:
    10,135
    Location:
    Yorkshire
    There's another tier of distinction - Eton, Harrow, Charterhouse (I think) have almost medeival origins - super posh. Rugby, and others established 19c, educated the sons of 'new money' industrialists.

    Also, sometimes you meet a guy who says 'Boarding School,' and he means some kind of naughty school/or borstal. That's happened a couple of times.
     
    Wreybies likes this.
  6. Wreybies

    Wreybies Thrice Retired Supporter Contributor

    Joined:
    May 1, 2008
    Messages:
    23,826
    Likes Received:
    20,815
    Location:
    El Tembloroso Caribe
    This is why I ask. Typically, in the U.S., a boarding school is thought of as a school to which one is sent for disciplinary reasons. Not always, and there are boarding schools here that are really what we call "prep schools", but when it's a fancy type of boarding school in America, the uppity yank will refer to it by name. When it's not, then just the generic boarding school.
     
  7. matwoolf

    matwoolf Banned Contributor

    Joined:
    Mar 21, 2012
    Messages:
    6,631
    Likes Received:
    10,135
    Location:
    Yorkshire
    The range - from Public to Independent, to Grammar and State (very few state schools and probably in Wales) can be discerned from this league table:

    http://www.schoolsrugby.co.uk/dailymailtrophy.aspx

    ...some big names in there...

    [Still mulling over the 'Military Academy' question]

    ...also @MarcT , why 'detached emotional tone?' To me, that seems almost the point of the exercise, a tear for the 8 year old laddie, as the gin-soaked duchess waves goodbye...
     
  8. LostThePlot

    LostThePlot Naysmith Contributor

    Joined:
    Dec 31, 2015
    Messages:
    2,398
    Likes Received:
    2,026
    Personally I would look towards writing something more structured around the experience. Whether that's organizing separate pieces around a central theme or focusing on more narrative strands; I think just 'memoirs of a guy you've never heard of' needs something a bit more than just being that. Part of what makes memoirs interesting is because the person in the book grew into someone of note and these are the experiences that formed them which is interesting basically because of who they became. Assuming that you weren't sexually abused or otherwise dreadfully harmed by the experience it just feels like it needs some focus beyond being quietly melancholic.

    There's two ways I think you could do it:

    First; an essay collection type of affair with each one tightly focused on specific subjects that are interesting or stand out. That means that you can dance around in time as much as you like and just forget about the day to day school life stuff. That focus on the specifically engaging subjects would definitely help.

    Secondly; narrative non-fiction in a tighter time frame. A book that spans a few years and picks up one specific strand and the experiences that related to that; telling your story of sexual confusion, for example.
     
    jannert and matwoolf like this.
  9. matwoolf

    matwoolf Banned Contributor

    Joined:
    Mar 21, 2012
    Messages:
    6,631
    Likes Received:
    10,135
    Location:
    Yorkshire
    I used to think that way - but then somebody leant me 'Walter's Diary,' the bland 1940s account - gardening, walking the dog, and catching his train to the City... ...which was not compelling in any fashion, but comforting at bed time, lots of people read it. At its peak, he retires from his job in accounts, his wife dies eventually, and he spends Christmas with his children, that was sad.
     
  10. MarcT

    MarcT Active Member

    Joined:
    Aug 16, 2016
    Messages:
    206
    Likes Received:
    149
    Location:
    Buenos Aires, Argentina.
    I often wonder if my parents sent me there for disciplinary reasons in the first place, but that's another matter :)
    Boarding School in the UK, also know as prep school by the way, is generally where you go till about the age of 13/14 and then on to public school before uni at 18+. You sleep at both, is essentially what I'm saying.
    Why emotional detachment? Possibly because I want to put the emotion ( or lack of) into the situation and characters rather that it being an emotional commentary as such.
    The first scene on the first day on the first hour of being dumped at the school and seeing one's parents drive away when you are five years old can be charged with emotion in many different ways. Luckily I still remember it, so I'd better get writing before it fades. Oh and my mum did like a tipple of gin by the way.
    The structure is crucial, yes. Who really wants to read a memoir of an unknown writer and his angst and anti authoritarian issues? On the other hand, a timeline that deals with specific standout moments, such as paedophile teachers, sexy matrons, mutual masterbation, adventure training, extreme teacher cruelty and your first kiss with both a boy and a girl (at different times) could focus the reader.
    I believe a lot of young people, if not most, have no idea what these schools used to be like. I tell my stepson tales of what happened and he finds them hard to believe. he always thought every boarding school in England was Hogwarts.
    Far from it. Without going into too much detail at this point, there was one teacher who got a kick out of teaching us to masterbate in History class when we were ten years old and matrons who would encourage us to fondle their breasts when kissing us goodnight.
    I certainly think there's enough material there anyhow. It's how I write it that counts and LostThePlot makes a very valid point, which I will take seriously.
     
  11. Homer Potvin

    Homer Potvin A tombstone hand and a graveyard mind Staff Supporter Contributor

    Joined:
    Jan 8, 2017
    Messages:
    12,138
    Likes Received:
    19,762
    Location:
    Rhode Island
    I'd read that.
     
  12. SethLoki

    SethLoki Retired Autodidact Contributor

    Joined:
    Jan 1, 2011
    Messages:
    1,566
    Likes Received:
    1,655
    Location:
    Manchester UK
    Me too. I've mentioned on here before I'm a product of something similar, so the interest would be strong in this one. I'd want the emotional slant and one of those narrative strands though as suggested above.
     
    MarcT likes this.
  13. MarcT

    MarcT Active Member

    Joined:
    Aug 16, 2016
    Messages:
    206
    Likes Received:
    149
    Location:
    Buenos Aires, Argentina.
    Watching If..., directed by Lindsay Anderson, reminds me that the experience would have been very similar for many of us. That film really resonates, except we never managed to set fire to the school or mow down any teachers with Brownings.
    We found other ways that were nearly as satisfying.
     
  14. Wreybies

    Wreybies Thrice Retired Supporter Contributor

    Joined:
    May 1, 2008
    Messages:
    23,826
    Likes Received:
    20,815
    Location:
    El Tembloroso Caribe
    A perennial favorite of mine, this film. :)

    Pretty little Bobby Phillips in this film was my very first ever cinema run-in with the idea that boys can be keen on boys.
     
  15. LostThePlot

    LostThePlot Naysmith Contributor

    Joined:
    Dec 31, 2015
    Messages:
    2,398
    Likes Received:
    2,026
    I agree that there's good material there, I just can't help feeling that the time scale is too long to just write a straight memoir around those moments without them being too diluted to hold attention. Splitting it into sections with each one focused on a specific area and then telling the story of that with it's critical events and how it effects you and your peers would make sure that this stays concentrated and give you narrative flow, keeping related events close together (in terms of pages) even when they were potentially years apart. That means that, for example, you can start off at being a homesick kid, learn to cope with that, make friends, then start laughing at the little kids for being homesick all in one strand, even though those experiences might be separated by five or more years. Giving each section it's own narrative and keeping together those important events would, I think, give a clearer picture of why this really effected you instead of everything mixing together.

    Yeah, If... Is a great film, one that really resonated with me specifically. My English teacher was the one who originally lent me a video copy of If... when I was about fourteen and it's still one of my favorite movies and for a long time Mick was my hero. I think it's a pity that more people don't know about it honestly, because everyone in it is awesome and there's something very true in how the crusaders act. I suppose that a lot of people these days just don't recognize that kind of school but I certainly did. I shared the movies with a friend of mine I used to get the bus with and I remember we used to do the mock-sword fighting thing the crusaders do in the movie. Also my mum went out with a boy who claimed to have been an extra in the movie; she couldn't confirm that but he certainly went to the school they filmed it at.

    I wasn't at a bordering school but I was at a very old fashioned boys grammar school that had a school song with seventeen verses, a giant portrait of our great 17th century benefactor in the hall and war memorials of old boys going back before the first world war. We had founders day and old boys coming back in the old school tie and I remember walking up from the cathedral where we had the founders day service up to school for the sports day festivities and running into a 40 year old guy who roundly mocked my friends and I for being in Gordon house not Pitt, to which we pointed out that Gordon had won the Cock House Championship (seriously, that's the name of the inter-house competition; the Cock House Championship) for fourteen years in a row while he was at school. We still had house masters and prefects and we all took a lot of pride in our house. The attitude that everyone had to pitch in and try hard got drummed into us and no-one got to duck out of running cross country or playing rugby for the house. We needed about twenty people to make a rugby team with twenty six in my class and it didn't matter how weedy you were you were going to do your bit. And of course when we hammered both the oiks from down the hill and the poofs from the private school at rugby this was a cause for great rejoicing. While I played for the school our team lost I think one match in four years which remains a record to this day.

    Sometimes it's weird to me to talk to other people my age who didn't encounter that kind of 1950s pageantry. I'm genuinely not very old, I started at my school in 1998, but my experiences of school were just so utterly different to most of the people I've known since and even not being a border is does very much colour your perception of the world. Just seeing people who didn't learn latin or who weren't proud of their school, and indeed who didn't have a boy as their first kiss (in my case on a trip to Germany where we both swapped our rooms around to get a night together), just seems very odd to me because that's just the world that I knew. We even had a girls school right across the road and so we all got the same buses but even outside of school we stayed scrupulously gender segregated (although I know teenage boys and I can't blame the girls for staying away :p). The only girls I even knew the names of were ones who went to my junior school.

    Especially going to a school where almost every teacher had a lazy, easy confidence and was able to control their class makes so much difference to how the school world looks to you, and my school was not shy about expelling people who caused real problems. A bunch of our teachers went to the school as kids too and many of them were 'characters' as you might say. I remember one teacher who would accuse people of wanking if he saw them fidgeting with stuff under the table, to many guffaws. That's the kind of thing that you can't get away with anymore of course, but looking back that's the kind of thing that you probably shouldn't have been able to get away with then either. I distinctly remember a couple of really disruptive kids being placed in the gently corrective care of our PE teacher (also my house master) who made them run laps of the playing fields until they threw up.

    Did you get called 'boy' by teachers until you left school? That's something that made my better half laugh when I told her but it really was true for us. To the teachers, any random pupil was just 'You! Boy!' even when they were 17 and were driving to school. Even little stuff like that feel so normal to me but others say not. Even just always calling teachers sir or miss, even outside of school is something that is very instinctive to me but the people I've worked with since I left think that's weird.

    Suffice to say that school is definitely something that effects you and definitely your experiences could be really interesting. The critical thing is that If... takes places in a really short space of time, using different ages of pupils to illustrate everything happening at one time and that is how they cram it all in. If it was just one narrative following young Mick all the way from being a fag to being a school shooter then it'd lose the thread. I think if you focus on the most important stuff there then that'll make sure you get across what you want to.
     
    jannert and MarcT like this.
  16. LostThePlot

    LostThePlot Naysmith Contributor

    Joined:
    Dec 31, 2015
    Messages:
    2,398
    Likes Received:
    2,026
    All this homosexual flirtation, it's so adolescent!

    No but seriously, Bobby Philips is quite pretty. And him and Wallace are cute together. I love that Bobby tags along with them to go murdering just like Mick's girlfriend does.
     
    MarcT and Wreybies like this.
  17. matwoolf

    matwoolf Banned Contributor

    Joined:
    Mar 21, 2012
    Messages:
    6,631
    Likes Received:
    10,135
    Location:
    Yorkshire
    Might as well begin the journey:

    Chapter 1, Desolation Durham

    The sensation of cold leather upon thighs brings memory flooding to my eyeballs. I stepped from the Bentley, bowed goodbye to Mama and to Boris the Hungarian chauffeur. I took the claw of Mrs Nipple, the cruel matron, and never saw my parents again, not until final post-graduation from Cambridge University on my 31st birthday.

    The corridors of St Brides echoed with the sobs and the screams of a thousand other tiny boys marooned here in the Cumbrian country. That first day - and due to a rash of measles on Kipling wing I was selected to play rugger against Sedburgh College. Recalling - the ball spilled from scrimmage. I tucking the pig’s skin under my elbow and raced for the line. Later, hoisted head high, I was a hero to this community of brothers.

    Biscuits with the headmaster became the customary reward. Standing under ice water, I showered naked, scrubbed dirty kneecaps, and nibbled. The headmaster passed me his individual bourbons.

    ‘On your knees, boy,’ he said, ‘swallow the biscuit.’

    In the darkness, each biscuit felt chewy. I was unable to digest the round, hairy biscuit in one swallow.

    ‘One more biscuit...’ said the headmaster.

    And these next biscuits tasted salty, or like the saveloy sorround of ‘Ye Olde Fish & Chip Shoppe’ I remember from our geography field expedition to ‘Birmingham…’
     
    Last edited: Feb 23, 2017
    Spencer1990 and jannert like this.
  18. Wreybies

    Wreybies Thrice Retired Supporter Contributor

    Joined:
    May 1, 2008
    Messages:
    23,826
    Likes Received:
    20,815
    Location:
    El Tembloroso Caribe
    Crikey.... o_O
     
  19. matwoolf

    matwoolf Banned Contributor

    Joined:
    Mar 21, 2012
    Messages:
    6,631
    Likes Received:
    10,135
    Location:
    Yorkshire
    I'll keep drafting school memories
     
  20. MarcT

    MarcT Active Member

    Joined:
    Aug 16, 2016
    Messages:
    206
    Likes Received:
    149
    Location:
    Buenos Aires, Argentina.
    You put all that down beautifully and yes, it was a world apart.
    You are quite right you know. A chronological timeline, trying to squeeze all those twelve years into a bland linear narrative would be dull. It is the highlights (lowlights?) that make the story as you correctly point out.
    Being a new boy anywhere is tough, we've all been through it and that's where the story starts, leading on to the aspects that most stand out in my mind today.
    It's also worth pointing out that whilst writing and thinking, small snippets are now coming back to me in glorious technicolour, such as the kilt worn by the headmaster's pretty daughter who befriended us both in 1962.
    Thanks for the input mate!
     
  21. MarcT

    MarcT Active Member

    Joined:
    Aug 16, 2016
    Messages:
    206
    Likes Received:
    149
    Location:
    Buenos Aires, Argentina.
    I too went to a boarding school in Cumbria. Could it be the same one?
     
  22. jannert

    jannert Retired Mod Supporter Contributor

    Joined:
    Mar 7, 2013
    Messages:
    17,674
    Likes Received:
    19,889
    Location:
    Scotland
    I'm not at all knowledgeable about boarding schools, having attended ordinary grade school, junior high and high school in the USA. However, I agree with @LostThePlot regarding the organisation of your memoir, @MarcT .

    I have a friend here who has written a magnificent memoir of her childhood and teenaged years. She organised it by event. One chapter deals with Christmas and how her family used to celebrate it. One chapter deals with games she played at school with her friends. Once chapter deals with washday at her home, etc. This is an excellent way to organise chapters.

    She said that so much of her life she'd forgotten about came back to her as she wrote. She wrote this memoir for her grandchildren, who are living an entirely different kind of life from the one she did, and she wanted them to know what it was like back in grandma's day. Her book is astoundingly good. To the extent that, as I was reading it, I quite forget it was my friend who had written it. It was a window on another world. She won't publish it because she's named names and been honest. But it's of publishable standard, for sure.
     
    MarcT likes this.
  23. MarcT

    MarcT Active Member

    Joined:
    Aug 16, 2016
    Messages:
    206
    Likes Received:
    149
    Location:
    Buenos Aires, Argentina.
    Thanks for your advice jannert and losttheplot. It appears to be the best way to write the story. Like a four seasons pizza, but with twelve delicious slices.
     
  24. matwoolf

    matwoolf Banned Contributor

    Joined:
    Mar 21, 2012
    Messages:
    6,631
    Likes Received:
    10,135
    Location:
    Yorkshire
    No, I attended a very famous grammar school in Kingston.
     
  25. matwoolf

    matwoolf Banned Contributor

    Joined:
    Mar 21, 2012
    Messages:
    6,631
    Likes Received:
    10,135
    Location:
    Yorkshire
    Shudder
     

Share This Page

  1. This site uses cookies to help personalise content, tailor your experience and to keep you logged in if you register.
    By continuing to use this site, you are consenting to our use of cookies.
    Dismiss Notice