you tell me it's the making of me...

 

As I was driving to an appointment this morning, I was listening to the band James. I’ve been a fan of the band for a long time now, but it’s fair to say that I’m more familiar with some of their back catalogue than others. A song called “Ten Below” began to play. This is on the album “The Night Before”, which was released in 2010 and which I bought when it first came out. I’ve listened to the song before and I’m familiar with how it goes, but this morning, perhaps for the first time, I found myself really focusing on the lyrics.

 

It’s about being sent to a boarding school.

 

-

 

So I'm on my own
Far from my broken home
And it costs
Feels like 10 below
Pack me off to school
Innocence and trust
Are all lost
Where did my childhood go?

Calling from the payphone
Trying not to cry
Feeling I am dying
Telling you I'm fine
You tell me it's the making of me
That's a fucking lie
When's the holidays?
Holidays
Holidays

I'm at the bottom of my bed
Headphones on my head
John Peel's show
Feels like 10 below
The sky's a dull gun metal
Where did the sun
And it rains and rains
Feels like 10 below

Turning on the weaker ones
When we were bored
I used to have feelings
But all I feel’s a hole
Is where the heart is
And the organ praise the lord

When's the holidays
Holidays
Holidays

He's at war
He's at war
With himself at the world
He's at war
He will strike first to anticipate
He's at war
Don't know how to relate
Feel like a cold war spy
If I'm caught
Take the easy way out

 

-

 

I’m fifty years old now, and my school days are a long way behind me now…. And yet, it seems that the damage it caused is still very much with me. The song finished, and I found myself reaching to play it again, taking the time this time around to really let the lyrics sink in.

 

Calling from the payphone
Trying not to cry
Feeling I am dying
Telling you I'm fine
You tell me it's the making of me
That's a fucking lie

 

I was seven when I was first sent to board. I didn’t know any better and just trusted that my parents knew what they were doing. What seven-year-old would be any different?

 

Looking back at photos now, I look impossibly small and vulnerable and I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been for my parents to pack up my new school uniform into a trunk and to drop me off at this strange new school about an hour away from the only home I’d ever known. But drop me off they did, and I can still remember that first night in the dormitory, surrounded by the beds of around fourteen other small children, some sobbing quietly in the dark. I didn’t cry, and I don’t remember ever feeling particularly homesick. I just adjusted to this new life.

 

Looking back on it now, I can see how I learned to survive by bottling things up inside. You quickly learn that emotions are a weakness that someone else can use against you, so you smother them. It’s a defence mechanism; you are surrounded by bigger, older kids and it’s so much easier to conform than to stand out. It’s something that I didn’t notice was happening at the time, and it wasn’t really until much, much later that I began to wonder what long-lasting damage this might have done. Did my parents see this happening to me when I came home for the holidays?

 

Many years later, I saw an animation created by an artist to a narration by her father explaining how he walled his emotions up inside so that he could survive at his school. The animation is of a small, scared boy peering out of a window in the chest of a robot. The robot is marching, and we soon see that he’s part of a robot army, each robot with a small window in its chest containing a small, frightened child. This was very close to home, and I found myself moved by the thought of myself as a small child with mousey brown hair, glasses and wonky teeth learning to survive by supressing and hiding my emotions.

Turning on the weaker ones
When we were bored
I used to have feelings
But all I feel’s a hole
Is where the heart is

 

It's taken me a long time to start to be comfortable showing and expressing my emotions. Thirty-five years later and I’m still a work-in-progress, as my wife will happily tell you (largely single-sex schooling probably didn’t help). I look at some of my schoolmates – still my closest friends - and realise that I’m one of the luckier ones and for some, the damage is still very clearly visible. I think I’m always going to be guarded about sharing my feelings and I’m told that I am very difficult to read, but I think I’m far more emotionally articulate than I used to be, and definitely more so than some of my other friends.

 

My mum died last year, and I’ve found myself thinking about how especially hard it must have been for her to send her child away like this. As we contributed to the eulogy for her funeral, my elder brother suggested including a memory of having burgers for tea on a Saturday evening in front of the A-Team. It’s a vivid memory, but for me, it’s tainted by the fact that we had only arrived back from school that evening and would be dropped back at school first thing on Monday morning; we were visitors in our family home and just passing through. Not just that, but we actually ate those burgers in a room in front of the tv and away from our parents, who ate somewhere else, so it’s not even a memory that we share with them. In any case, by the time I was thirteen and moved to another school, even those weekend visits stopped as we became full-time boarders.

 

When's the holidays?
Holidays
Holidays

 

My father has been coming to terms with the death of my mum for the last 18 months, and I’ve found myself thinking more of him and the damage I think our schooling did to him. He was a busy doctor, and my childhood memories are that he was always on call or out helping patients and didn’t particularly seem to have all that much time for his own family. At Christmas, we would not open our presents until he was back from his rounds. He always volunteered to be the doctor on call because, so he said, the other doctors all had young families. What on earth were we? Even now, when I think that I haven’t spoken to my dad for several weeks and I should perhaps give him a call to see how he is, I sometimes stop myself and think that telephones work both ways and that he can always pick up the phone to me if he wants to chat… but somehow he never does. When I ask him, it’s because he doesn’t want to bother me. How damaged has he been by the fact that I stopped being a part of his daily life when I was 7 years old and I’ve never lived at home with him properly since?

 

He's at war
He's at war
With himself at the world
He's at war
He will strike first to anticipate
He's at war
Don't know how to relate

I count my blessings, really. I survived my schooling and I don’t think I’m an unexploded bomb, liable to blow at any moment. I did go through an angry phase in my early twenties, happily sabotaging my own relationships and career prospects. I think I was trying to adjust to life outside of the bubble afforded by school and by university. My schooling was so immersive that I don’t think I ever really experienced university in the way that many people do: it wasn’t my first time away from home and, in large part, it was more of the same. I’m so grateful now that I didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge. The universities I did attend were large and filled with people from all sorts of different backgrounds. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have been good for me to be in an Oxbridge College, surrounded by people of similar backgrounds and experiences. It certainly wasn’t good for those of my schoolfriends who went, anyway. University wasn’t a big deal for me, but I think I made the first few tentative steps of my journey back towards emotional balance there, even if there was a long way still to travel. I just had no real preparation for life in the real world, interacting with real people.

 

I don’t have any kids, but my mum once asked me if I would consider sending any offspring to a boarding school. When I said “under no circumstances”, I can remember my mum bursting into tears. My parents made huge personal and financial sacrifices to send their three sons to boarding school. I’m sure it wasn’t a decision that they made lightly, and they did so with the very best of intentions to give us the best possible start in life. Both had come from relatively humble backgrounds and had worked hard to be in a position where this was even a possibility. How can I hold it against them?

 

They did the best they could.

 

It's just that the emotional scarring runs deep.