Colditz!

Colditz!

 

My unhappy time at boarding school began with two dreadful years at Junior House. In some ways it was a case of "in at the deep end", and after J.H. the transition to the senior school was relatively painless.

 

There was something sinister, something rather threatening, about the way that the dormitory wings stuck out on either side of the building. The BBC series of The Colditz Story was on TV at more or less the time when I was an inmate at J.H., so the two are inextricably linked in my memory. Someone once told me that they had asked Douglas Bader what it was like being a POW at Colditz Castle and he replied that most of the time it was very, very boring (rather like LWC). On Sunday afternoons we had to go for a walk. At first, it was fun to explore the Copse and the surrounding countryside, but you soon find it pretty boring when you do it every Sunday. 

 

Boarding schools gradually weaken and destroy the relationships between children and their parents. If he (or she) does not see them for weeks or months, then it is inevitable that a child will begin to feel distant and disconnected from his or her parents. I had been close to my mother before I went to LWC, so it was a bit of a shock when I did not see her again for weeks or even months. (She was too far away and she didn't drive.) It seems hard to believe, but I actually received a letter from my mother, which informed me that she and Eric, my stepfather, had moved house in the middle of the term. Did she enclose a little map? I can't remember.

 

aka Lord Wandsworth College

 

It was at J.H. that, on one memorable occasion, I received what schoolboys called, with their usual dark humour, "six of the best". Yes, I had been caught red-handed (or maybe red-tongued or red-eared) swearing, using a certain four-letter word, so I cannot claim innocence. After the beating, I had to do my prep and then up to the dormitory and bed. This was where things became really painful. My underpants were stuck to my backside with dried blood. As I took them off, pieces of skin came away from my bum.     

 

 

I was very annoyed and aggrieved when one of the teachers at Junior House confiscated some of my "Archie" comics. (It was the same one who had reported me to my housemaster for swearing.) He claimed that the comics were "suggestive" and, like most eleven-year-olds, I had no idea what he meant. Sometimes the wheels of justice turn very slowly, but I was rather pleased, a year or two after leaving J.H., to learn that Mr. P.J. Cooke had suddenly left LWC "for health reasons", although in Cookie's case the medical problems were caused by the Police arresting him for sexually assaulting several boys in Junior House. As the French say, la vengeance est un plat qui se mange froide.