Last night I had a dream/nightmare about school. This fortunately doesn't happen too often, but was probably provoked by finding some letters the other day that I had sent to my father when I was at boarding school. Goodness, what a load of rubbish! Pages of waffle about 'best friends' with ridiculous nicknames, who, of course, I no longer even remember. The school timetable and the menus are still engraved on my heart, all these years on. After three hours of class Saturday morning we had Letter Writing from 11 a.m. for one hour. It was obligatory to write to one's parents, and if you had time left over, you were allowed to write to other members of the family or friends - if that 'friend' was on the list of suitable receivers of letters furnished by parents at the beginning of each term! We were not allowed to seal the envelopes, as the letters were censored before being sent.
Incoming mail had to have the senders' name and address on the back of the envelope, otherwise it was opened and read and all parcels were opened, just in case some parent thought of smuggling in SWEETS! Letters were distributed after lunch and after supper (remember the days when there was a morning and an afternoon delivery by the Royal Mail?).
Letters were our only contact with 'the outside world' and so, of course, used as blackmail. If we were, either collectively or individually, rowdy or misbehaved, mail was stopped and given out the following day...
There was no telephone for us to use and non of the common rooms had TV apart from the 6th form, and that was limited to an hour in the evening, and a member of staff would choose the programme. If there was nothing suitable, they didn't watch TV! During my time at school, I saw two programmes - the first landing on the Moon and the funeral of Winston Churchill. Our knowledge of what was happening in the outside world was limited to one copy of the Telegraph posted on the general noticeboard and even that was censored - offending articles were cut out, meaning that a large chunk of a non-offending article on the following page was missing! The paper was put up at midday and taken down at 6pm. During that time we had a half an hour of free time before tea, but had to change from day uniform to evening uniform, and if you were on the bath rota, the chances of reading the paper were next-to-none. One paper for 200 children with only a few minutes to read it - most of the time we gave up.
We had one exeat per term which ran from Saturday midday to Sunday at 6p.m. Those that lived the other end of the country either went to stay with a school chum going home for the weekend, or stayed at school. I hated the drive back to school, sitting in the back of the car feeling miserable, with 'Sing something simple' on the radio, as no-one could think of anything to say. A quick goodbye, and then back to the endless, hospital green corridors gleaming in the neon lighting, into supper which on Sunday night was a lump of Cheddar cheese, and a lump of pressed dates and an orange. To this day I cannot eat dates.
My brother too has awful memories of boarding school; he too dreams of it at times. However, I think, and hope, that we were the last generation that were treated in such a Dickensien manner - my half-brothers had a much easier time.
My school eventually closed down when I finished the 5th form. I went past it in the autumn - it is now a secured residence full of mock-Georgian houses - things don't really change much, do they?
This is a photo of the façade of my school - it never looked so smart in my day; this photo was taken by an Old Girl a couple of years ago, now that it has been converted into des. res! In my day the drive up to the school was full of pot-holes, straggly pines, overgrown cupressus, lanky laurel bushes - now it is all landscaped and very grand!
