Long life
Secrets of the dorm
Nigel Nicolson
As I live five miles from Benenden school, I am invited from time to time to lecture the girls on some topic of my own Fhoice. Once it was 'snobbishness', when I Insisted that no staff be present. On anoth- er occasion I chose `letter-writing', because nlY daughter was then at the school and between us we could concoct an outra- geous plot. , I Composed two sample letters for the i.ecture. One was the sort of letter which I Imagined a girl was writing weekly to her Parents, full of hockey scores and exam results. The other was the sort of letter that she ought to write, crammed with the latest gossip of the dorm and malicious pen- portraits of friends and teachers. I had obtained my information from my daugh- ter, but none of the girls and few of the appalled staff had the wit to detect my source. The lecture was a wild success. Miss Clarke, the excellent headmistress (she died only last week), heard for the first time the curious nickname by which she was known, 'Celeste'. It did not suit her character. She was firm but shy, the most difficult opposites to combine.
I was reminded of the lecture by coming across a fat bundle of my letters written from my private school, Summer Fields near Oxford. Eventually I was happy there, for it was and is a good school, but the start was hell. To this day I ean remember the coldness of the sheets with which I dried my homesick tears, and the ridicule which I aroused because I had been sent with shorts instead of trousers and tried to hide my knees behind the desks. I was only eight. There is no mention of either inci- dent in my first letters home. I suppressed them because I wanted to spare my parents distress and (possibly) a sense of guilt, and because even little boys (particularly little boys) have their pride.
Later letters did not anticipate the pre- cepts which I advocated so wickedly to the girls at Benenden. 'We played Dragons. I was right-back. We won 6-1', and then apologetically, 'I know football doesn't interest you, but you like to know what your son is doing'. Occasionally a boast: 'I've started boxing. I knocked out a boy yesterday. It's quite easy'. I suspect the truth of that, for little boys are also terrible fibbers. Then pathetically, 'I kiss your pic- tures goodnight every night, so that the glass is like the windows of the car when Henry [spaniel] has been inside'. I do not believe that this was written with any intent to arouse sympathy, but it must have wrung the heart of the recipient.
The main impression left by my letters is that school life was a succession of humilia- tions or fear of them. We were perpetually on the verge of trouble — for having lost a library book, muddled an equation, stolen a sweet. There is not much about these worries in my letters, but I know that they existed from the reiterated yearnings for the carefree holidays and the fear that one's mother might disgrace her son at half-term: 'Please come on time, and please don't wear the hat with the cherries'.
If parents still write to their children at boarding-school, let them suggest topics for correspondence, like, How are the spots? What's the French teacher like? What do you think about before you drop off to sleep?, on the principle that interesting questions provoke interesting replies. But you won't do it. You'll telephone. And you will never learn the libellous nickname of the head nor the innermost secrets of the dorm.
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