MYSCHOOL CO UK HOW TO

I learnt about sadness and rejection at that school. No more than anyone else, but I deal with it in my stories. It’s why there’s a lot of sadness in my books, because I’m still dealing with sadness. I’m certainly not advocating suffering, loneliness or isolation, but now I see that these experiences can inform you. You think, “why is this master or this man like this?” Later in life, when I came to read Shakespeare and so on, I understood more. You learn about other people, if you’re treated this way. Suffering is not something to encourage, but it certainly makes you think quite hard about other people. If I hurt myself, I could stop thinking about the humiliation. I remember pushing my finger so hard into a plaster wall that it hurt, deliberately. Hurting myself was something else I discovered.

MYSCHOOL CO UK HOW TO

To stop myself from crying I learnt how to make myself think about something different. I remember standing there and trying not to cry. In The Butterfly Lion, one teacher stands the main character, Bertie, in a corner with a book on his head. If there was any real damage done, I think it was due to being away from our mothers and fathers. I might have done too, who knows - but certainly, it wasn’t great to feel so much oppression around me. A lot of the children at that school, I’m quite sure, went through a lot of deep sadness and depression. We talk a lot about mental health now, but in those days, no-one talked about mental health. It gave me mechanisms I would use later in life, but the damage I think was quite significant. I’m not advocating this as a way of educating children, but a lot of us went through similar trials. I think children who went to boarding school have an advantage if they ever go to prison. I learnt to avoid bullies during my time there. In The Butterfly Lion, the bully Basher Beaumont corners the protagonist in the boot room and smears shoe polish all over him. As well as the sport, I also enjoyed singing in the choir. We were all scared, and we didn’t want to be punished, but we were naturally rebellious. It wasn’t all bad though, there was a lot of camaraderie between us, and a lot of daring. We weren’t allowed to read in bed, but we did anyway, under torchlight. School was a diet of Latin, stew, rugby, detentions, cross country runs, chilblains, squeaky beds which sagged in the middle, and semolina. She said, “what are we going to do with you? Shall I phone your parents?” I felt that my parents, particularly my stepfather, would be disappointed, so she drove me back, dropping me off in the woods so I could slip back into school without getting caught. She sat me down, put my wet shoes in the bottom of the oven, talked to me and calmed me down. I got in her car and went back to her home in Ashurst Wood. Thankfully, I met a lady who was very nice to me. I vividly remember running away in the rain one time, knowing that if I was caught I’d be beaten. I’ve always used my own life and my own memories enormously in my stories. My experiences there informed my book The Butterfly Lion. It’s closed now, which is what it deserved. I had to try not to cry in public when I saw her handwriting, so I read them in the toilets. I spent my weeks longing for letters from my mother. I learnt a lot we were all going through the same thing, and we all had to find strategies to get by. This meant I was looked upon with some favour by the teachers. My way of dealing with the punishment and humiliation was to become particularly good at cricket and rugby.

I’d get black marks as part of a system of minuses and pluses, and I was often called up in front of the whole school to be ticked off. I wasn’t a very good student, and I was in trouble all the time. There was lots of discipline, shouting and people telling me what to do. I didn’t want to go and I was very homesick, finding the regime very oppressive.

Then aged seven, I was sent to boarding school in Sussex with my brother. I enjoyed football, rugby and just messing around in the playground, and so I became an outdoor child, rather than an indoor one. Instead, I found something else I liked, which was playing sport. I wasn’t very good at it, and so I left the world of books behind. It wasn’t about sparking the imagination, it was simply about being examined - punishments, red lines, standing in corners - and occasionally the cane. I thought school would be a continuation of that, but the teaching in those days (and I have to say, to some extent these days) was all about tests. My mum had read to me often, and Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky had given me the idea that words, poems and pictures were quite fun. Copying out and rote learning was deeply disappointing to me, because I was fond of books and stories instead. It was in the 1940s when, aged five, I went to a primary school in Earl’s Court that was very strict.

Myschool co uk