Boarding blues

As someone who spent five years at boarding school, I applaud the campaign by Boarding Concern to keep younger children out of such schools to avoid lasting mental and emotional damage.

Many psychologists are now convinced that children who are suddenly wrenched out of their customary family environment and left to fend for themselves among strangers with only a passing interest in them suffer emotional injury that hampers their entire adult life.

They can suffer a host of negative emotions that are never properly dealt with. They can feel abandoned, betrayed, neglected, demoralised, bewildered, shocked, angry, sad, vulnerable and distressed. But nobody takes any notice. They're just expected to bury their misery, toughen up and pretend everything's fine.

The family members who would normally validate their feelings and give them the support they need aren't around, and the school staff are unwilling or unable to step into their shoes.

The result is that many boarders leave school emotionally repressed, and permanently distrustful and insecure. All that leads to serious problems with relationships and personal growth. Over and over again, the spouses of such ex-boarders (usually wives) comment on their inadequate personalities and emotional illiteracy.

Personally I can vouch for that. Although I'm much more in touch with my own, and other people's, feelings than I used to be, I'm still far from emotionally fluent and I still have a lot of trouble expressing what's going on inside me.

The staff at my school never showed any interest in my emotional well-being and left me to sink or swim in an atmosphere of rugged masculinity.

I'm glad the psychological pain of boarding is finally being recognised and I hope fewer children will be exposed to it. But it's depressing to learn that right now boarding schools are as popular as ever and just as many thoughtless parents are dumping their children into these destructive institutions (around 74,000 at the last count). They seem to be wilfully blind to the emotional harm that's being done to innocent hearts and minds.

Fool's errand

Like many parents at that time, I guess, my mother and father were always worried that I might grow up to be homo-sexual.

In the fifties homosexuality was still a crime, homophobia was rampant (the word had still to be invented), and gay men regularly committed suicide rather than face a lifetime of concealment or persecution.

The worrying was fair enough. But my parents went further and tried actively to prevent me becoming "one of them". In those days there were all sorts of hare-brained theories about why people became gay, and they didn't realise the futility of their efforts.

After a certain age they withdrew all physical affection, be it kissing, hugging or touching. They somehow believed that too much physical affection would turn me "the other way".

They scrutinised all my friends, and any male neighbours I talked to, for any signs of inappropriate behaviour or homosexual tendencies - whatever they might be.

Then bizarrely they sent me to an all-male boarding school, seemingly unaware that such schools were notorious for routine homosexuality. As it happened, there was never a whiff of gay sex in my particular school, so luckily for them I was spared the evil tentacles of Sodom.

They continued to be suspicious of my late teenage relationships, especially my friendship with a sixty year old abstract artist. My father was convinced he was trying to seduce me, despite the total absence of sexual overtones.

Eventually I left home and they were no longer able to monitor my activities. They were probably horrified when I started supporting the Gay Liberation Front.

But I never became gay and their decades of neurotic concern were completely pointless. It was nothing but a fool's errand all along.

PS: A new report by Stonewall says homophobia is still rampant in schools. It says 55% of gay pupils experience homophobic bullying and 96% hear words like "poof" or "lezza" in the classroom.