The past is a foreign country

This could easily be a series of posts. There are so many stories, so many odd little customs and characters. But I’ll keep it to one for now.

There’s a moment in adulthood when you realise the place you left at eighteen is still quietly steering your instincts. For me, that place is Wellington School in Somerset. My sister had already been there two years by the time I arrived at eleven, so it felt less like a choice and more like something you simply accepted, as many children from armed forces families did.

A number of my friends were in the same situation, their parents posted between Germany, Cyprus or Hong Kong. Others came from much further afield, arriving from the Middle East, Hong Kong or Africa, giving the place a surprisingly international character long before anyone called it that.

I’d earned a partial scholarship after being interviewed at eleven by a semicircle of elderly men who did their best not to appear intimidating. Whatever I said must’ve landed, because before I knew it I was packing a trunk and stepping into a world far colder and louder than I expected.

Cold showers, bunk beds and learning the alphabet backwards

My first term was a shock. I turned twelve in the sanatorium, homesick and slightly adrift. A nurse, doing her best to distract me, told me to learn the alphabet backwards. Oddly, it worked. It’s still a party trick I can perform at speed, long after the homesickness faded.

Halfway through that term my parents moved to Norway, which meant I went home only for Christmas, Easter and the long summer holiday. Wellington became my entire weather system for the rest of the year. And while I loved being home, I absolutely dreaded the moment I had to fly back. That creeping feeling in the pit of your stomach as the airport approaches, the quiet countdown to boarding, the knowledge of what awaits. It took years to shake off that trepidation. Even now, airports still carry the faintest echo of it.

My first two years were spent in a junior house that felt half wartime barracks, half Enid Blyton without the warmth. Bunk beds. Draughty corridors. Cold showers only. Not a bath in sight.

We wore uniform every day and did what we could to carve out some sort of identity within it. White socks pulled high. Skinny ties knotted dangerously thin. Lemon squeezed into our hair in the hope it’d bleach by the weekend. Small rebellions that felt enormous at the time.

Humour stitched everything together. Harmless pranks, water bombs dropped from upper windows, pillow fights that escalated joyfully, the odd wedgie delivered with a flourish. Boarding school teaches you not to take yourself too seriously because nobody else there will.

Communication with home was a weekly ritual. My sister and I would queue for the public payphone with a stack of 50p pieces. You fed them in as fast as you could while your five minutes of connection evaporated. Everything else arrived by letter, days late.

Every term I brought back pieces of home to make the place feel less alien. One year that meant recording the whole of Fawlty Towers onto audio cassettes so I could listen during prep. John Cleese did far more for my emotional equilibrium than any pastoral system.

The goth house, the cadets and the first hint of independence

At fourteen, when we were allowed to choose a senior house, I chose the goth-leaning creative one. Less macho bravado, less preppy, more interesting characters. The dorms were large, rows of single beds with a senior boy stationed in the corner as a sort of night watchman. Privacy was non-existent. Only in sixth form did the rooms shrink to two or three of us with rickety bunks and a tiny desk, which gave everything a faintly Victorian air.

The rituals were relentless. Mandatory chapel two or three mornings a week, with a longer service on Sundays. School on Saturday mornings. Cadets or volunteering every Wednesday afternoon. I chose Army Cadets and loved it. It offered a sense of structure that chapel never quite managed.

By sixteen I was done with church altogether. Instead I wandered off with my Muslim friends who, although about as religious as I was, were exempt from Christian chapel.

The school didn’t approve at first and I got into trouble, but someone eventually admitted the logic didn’t hold. Forcing me into chapel while they were allowed out made no sense. Permission was granted, grudgingly but decisively. A small teenage triumph. We also had a table tennis table in the senior house and played constantly. I became surprisingly competent. It’s one of those quietly useful skills that’s stuck with me.