Lessons from boarding school

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.

Running, rugby avoidance and the long road to the monument

Sport ruled the seasons. Rugby and cross-country in winter, cricket and athletics in summer. I wasn’t a fan of rugby. The pitches were often icy hard and we had to play in shorts. Breaking my arm in a tackle at fifteen didn’t help. Cricket bored me rigid, so athletics was always my refuge. Football, a passion that saw me break two windows by mistake in the junior house, was reserved for illicit kickabouts after hours, especially during the World Cup.

Around fourteen a senior boy, thanks Adeeb, taught me to run properly and something clicked. We ran the six-mile loop up to the Wellington Monument and back, lungs burning, legs misbehaving. I’ve been a runner in one form or another ever since. Funny how these things begin.

GCSEs, misplaced optimism and the subjects I didn’t choose

I was in the first year to take GCSEs and loved them. Lots of coursework and, crucially, a new subject called Craft Design Technology where I could finally flex my design muscles. It was my favourite by a mile and I’d’ve taken it straight to A-level if the school had offered it. They didn’t. And unsure what to study after doing reasonably well across the board, I hedged my bets with French, Economics and Chemistry. I still don’t know what I thought I was doing.

I also learned a whole new set of cultural rituals I’d never encountered before. Afternoon tea. Supper instead of dinner. Words and timings that belonged to a world I hadn’t grown up in. Boarding school teaches you many things, but one of the quietest is that class can be as bewildering as Latin.

Some teachers were extraordinary. My history teacher had lived through the Blitz and told stories that gripped the room. My physics teacher staged experiments that left us open-mouthed. It was these people, more than the traditions or rules, who made learning feel alive.

What boarding school really teaches you

All of this happened without phones or the internet. Silence was normal. Homesickness was absorbed rather than solved. You learned to self-regulate because you had no choice. You learned to read people instinctively, to negotiate space, to carry emotions quietly. You improvised comfort and developed a sort of inner weatherproofing.

It also did wonders for my minimalism. If you left anything out it’d be stolen, borrowed indefinitely or broken. You kept your belongings tight, tidy and close. And to this day I’m allergic to clutter, to the great annoyance of my wife and kids.

And if I carried anything else into adulthood that took longer to unpick, it was the chip on my shoulder when people assumed I’d come from great privilege. I wasn’t at Wellington because of family wealth. I was there because my hard-working parents made a difficult decision at a particular moment in our lives. That nuance rarely shows from the outside.

Would I send my own children to boarding school? Not as boarders. The education was solid, but the distance and intensity feel unnecessary now. A day school perhaps, but not the full experience. Children deserve more access to home than a term calendar allows.

We all left at the end of sixth form for our corners of the world and, apart from our parents’ phone numbers and home addresses, had no real way of staying in touch. I kept up with a handful at first, then fewer, until MySpace and eventually Facebook reconnected us a decade later. By then we were all living entirely different lives.

I hadn’t been back for more than twenty-five years until I took my family there a couple of years ago. Much had changed, some hadn’t. The facilities were far more modern, and football pitches had replaced many of the old rugby ones. The walls that once carried grey, slightly stern photographs of boys’ rugby teams through the decades now showed more modern and inclusive imagery. Walking those corridors again was oddly cathartic and I felt a real sense of pride at having been there. It was like closing a loop I didn’t know was still open.

I also distinctly remember, as if it were last week, seeing a group of “old boys” visiting during my final year. They must’ve been about fifty, and I remember joking with friends about all the old farts wandering around the place. It still makes me smile. Schoolboys can be so cruel.