Even at the age of ten, I couldn’t help but notice that my mother was ‘all of a twitch’ since our trip to Yorkshire, and had started to scrutinise the mail much more carefully than normal. Then one day it happened.
The usual assortment of letters flipped through the letter box onto the bristly brown door mat, causing a temporary draft. There were the usual manilla window envelopes for gas, electricity, coal (for the Aga), the local department store account and yes, bizarrely, dry cleaning for my father’s collars! These mundane offerings were lightened occasionally by a rare, smart, good quality square envelope, concealing a party or perhaps a wedding invitation. Sometimes there would be a friend’s handwritten letter (yes, remember those?), in a coloured envelope with a floral motif on the back. That day, however there was unfamiliar addition, a rectangular pristine white envelope bearing a fancy crest on the top left-hand corner.
My mother sliced it briskly open with the paperknife, scanned its contents briefly and smiled smugly before placing it in the letter rack, next to the Bush radio in the kitchen.
I don’t recall being shown or having its contents read to me, but can imagine it must have gone along the lines of:
“Dear Mr & Mrs ….
It was a pleasure to meet you and your daughter on your recent visit to our school. We feel confident that we can offer our girls not only the best opportunity of academic success but a truly all round education for life.
We will be delighted to offer Catharine a place in September, subject to Common Entrance Examination success”… blah, de blah, de blah…
Little did I realise, how those few uneven lines, probably typed on a noisy rickety Remington, would change not only the course of my life, but me, my personality, forever.
Not only did that letter prompt my, ‘Privileged Misfortune’, enabling me to endure seven agonisingly slow miserable years of existence, but once I’d escaped, I spent much of the next couple of decades justifying my experience, and quelling the myths. People never seemed to understand that:
Number 1: I did not choose to go away to school, I was sent.
Number 2: Ironically, despite the inevitably hefty fees, as pupils, we actually lived an extremely spartan life and certainly much more frugally than our contemporaries at any state school. Even if you had secreted away some extra money, (heaven knowns where from), the only two shops of any interest in the village weren’t going to send anyone into raptures, especially when you’d only got an hour on Saturday afternoon to spend it in the first place.
Number 3: It wasn’t jolly hockey-sticks, midnight feasts and wealthy kids with posh accents after all. It was discipline, mundane routines, isolation and of course dire homesickness. I missed hearing Dad whistling round the house whilst doing his nightly ritual of polishing shoes in the kitchen. I missed Beatles’ music blasting from my brother’s bedroom when the door was opened briefly and seeing his Melody Maker magazines strewn across the floor. I missed cycling round to Gran’s and watching her making potted meat in her chaotic kitchen. I missed being a passenger in a car, privacy, silence, carpets, simple treats, normal clothes, the ring of the hall telephone… and above all, the immeasurable comfort of a hug. I missed the ordinary.
It has been said that there is, indeed, everything on the curriculum at boarding school….. except….. emotional intelligence. The creation of the Boarding School Survivors group speaks volumes and can help you get to grips with what is evidently known as, ‘strategic survival personality’.
Are you sure you’ve still got that yearning to go?
Looking back, perhaps I should have intercepted that letter or glued up the letterbox – chance would have been a fine thing. No, as usual, my mother’s wishes won through. “It was the making of you”, my mother infuriatingly used to cry. Resilience, may be, I agree, ….but at what price?
I’ll never know what course my life would have taken had that letter never come, I only wish I’d had the chance to try.
