Novelist William Boyd’s memories of his schooldays at the remote boarding school of Gordonstoun, on the Moray Firth, deflate the myth that public school education is innately superior to comprehensive. Far from home in Africa, the convivial Boyd fitted in well, yet his experience of the bigotry, snobbishness and squalor of dorm life appears to have left him with simmering resentment.
The living quarters of your average public schoolboy are at best functional and soulless, and at worst utterly disgusting. If Borstals or remand homes were maintained in similar conditions, there would be a public outcry. I recently visited several famous public schools, and nothing I saw there made me so depressed as the dormitories and the thought that for so many years I had slept so many nights in such dismal and depressing circumstances.
It is, I think, a retrospective revulsion. Adolescent boys are not much preoccupied with personal hygiene, let alone the care and maintenance of their living quarters. But now, when I recall the concrete and tile washrooms and lavatories, the pale-green dormitories with their crude wooden beds, I form a new respect for the resilience and fortitude of the adolescent spirit …
When I arrived at the school, aged thirteen, in 1965, everything about the house was functional and anonymous…. Only in the studies was individual decoration permitted, but as this consisted almost entirely of pictures of women scissored from lingerie and swimwear advertisements, they too had a homogenous air.
The house was large, but it felt curiously constricted. In the summer one could get outside, but during the winter there was nowhere else to go…. We had a succession of popular and ineffectual housemasters. There was no discipline. A new housemaster was strenuously trying to impose his authority. But when he retired to his flat at the end of the day the old regime established itself. The source of the problem was a group of boys in the sixteen-to-seventeen age bracket. They were ‘bad’ in the sense that they had no interest in promotion. In the evenings they terrorized juniors with a kind of candid ruthlessness that I still find chilling to recall. They would roam the junior studies, four or five of these roughs, and beat people up at random, extort money or food, rifle letters and lockers in search of diversion. One felt in a way rather like a medieval peasant during the Hundred Years War: one never knew when another marauding army might march by, randomly distributing death and destruction. It was comparatively short-lived, this period of capricious thuggery, but it provided me with a full catalogue of the resourceful cruelties of the adolescent mind …
Our school was in Scotland, was in almost every respect a Scottish public school, and yet a strong Scottish accent was a real stigma. Indeed, any regional accent was parodied mercilessly. When people spoke with a strong Scottish accent we would make harsh retching sounds in the base of our throats or emit loose-jawed idiot burblings. Anyone with a Midlands or north of England accent heard nothing but a barrage of ‘Eeh bah goom’ and ‘Trooble at t’ mill’. We all found mocking of accents endlessly amusing. This was part snobbery, part self-defence. All public schoolboys have an intensely adversarial relationship with the local population, especially with the local youths. To us the locals were ‘yobs’, ‘oiks’, ‘plebs’, ‘proles’, ‘peasants’ and ‘yokels’. It now seems to me astonishing to recall the patrician venom we would express, like aristocrats faced with imminent revolution – a curious mixture of contempt, fear, guilt and jealousy. They lived, after all, in the real world beyond the school grounds, and however superior we congratulated ourselves on being, there was no escaping the fact that they were freer than we were – and that grated. I am sure that we in our turn were looked on as revolting, arrogant, nasty snobs. By no means a harsh judgement.
We longed to get out of the school, but the outside world was both a lure and a taunt. It possessed everything that school denied us and at the same time was a constant reminder of the constraints and abnormalities of the society in which we were confined. Strenuous attempts were made to escape it.
The easiest way to get there was to be selected for a school team. Because the school was situated so far north a considerable amount of travelling was involved in order to find reputable opponents. Rugby and hockey would take you to Inverness or Aberdeen two or three times a term, and often there were matches in Dundee, Glasgow, and Edinburgh. Edinburgh occupied a place in our imaginations rather as Berlin did for poets in the 1930s. It seemed to our impoverished eyes unfailingly sinful and glamorous. To be selected for a rugby tour to Edinburgh meant happy hours in Thistle Street pubs rather than eager sporting challenges …
The outside world was a welcome source of contraband – pornography, drink, cigarettes – and also, in a sense, fair game. When boys went into towns the shoplifting rate rose alarmingly. In the local Woolworth’s two store detectives used to follow one particular boy around. He was the most accomplished kleptomaniac and used to take orders for his Saturday visits. We exulted in our delinquency and bandied legends of epic thefts: a souvenir shop in the Highlands left almost empty when a busload of boys cleaned it out; a boy who dug up copper wires on a nearby RAF station, at one stage blacking out the control tower when he sank his axe into a crucial cable. We would return gleefully to the safety of school, clutching our booty. And yet within the school itself theft was regarded as the most serious and antisocial of crimes – any thief could expect years of excoriation. Two worlds, two sets of standards …
We were obsessed with sex. I know this is true of all adolescent experience, but when I think now of the energy and relentless focus of our interminable discussions about the subject a sort of retrospective lassitude descends upon me, as well as a retrospective anger. Of course we talked about sex – we lived in a freakish, monosexual society. There was a parallel world out there in which the two sexes mingled and interacted and to which entry was denied us. No wonder our curiosity was so febrile and intense – and so destructive. The sexual apartheid to which we were subjected all those years utterly warped our attitudes and precluded us from thinking about girls and women in any way but the most prurient and lubricious. The female sex was judged by one criterion – fanciable or non-fanciable, to put it rather more delicately than we did …
The people who bore the brunt of our lewd interest were the maids. These were local girls, I think, and were hired – so public-school rumour famously has it – solely on the grounds of their ugliness. It made little difference. Their encounters with the boys, three times a day at meals, were characterized by a one-sided traffic of sexual banter of the vilest and coarsest sort. Given the opportunity, more daring boys actually molested them – squeezing, pinching, feeling. The girls were remarkably tolerant. I never heard of any boy disciplined as a result of a complaint made by one of them. I think our attitudes to them brought out the very worst in our natures: it was male lust at its most dog-like and contemptuous, tarnished further by a brand of wilful class disdain and mockery that was almost dehumanizing …
There was also, it is true, a brand of passionate romanticism about our sexual curiosity that was slightly more amusing. Nobody ever admitted to being a virgin. By tacit consent conversation about the great day was always rather vague and woolly – it was just taken as read that everybody was, well, pretty experienced. There was one boy who made the mistake of confessing, at the age of seventeen, that he had still to lose his virginity. He became the laughing stock in the house. Little boys of fourteen would howl, ‘Virgin! Virgin!’ at him. He came back the next term claiming to have lost it in the holidays, but it was too late. His greatest mistake was to have admitted it – the only honest man among shameless liars …
The school dance was little more than a meat market. By the time the girls arrived all the boys were well-fortified with alcohol. At the first slow number they pounced. The occasion degraded everybody. The Gilbert and Sullivans were more fun and more decorum reigned. We were meant to be rehearsing and we saw the girls quite regularly over a period of a month. Courtship rituals were rather primly observed, and the alliances that were struck up remained for a good while on a rather chaste level – one was often invited to the girl’s house for tea on Sunday afternoons to meet her parents, for example. This more sustained contact usually provoked the dormant, romantic side of our nature, and many of us fell deeply in love as a consolation for being denied any physical release. That came, eventually, usually as the dates of the performances approached, a sense of time running out – as with soldiers due to return to the front – affecting both boy and girl. These wistful encounters were not so shaming. They were like any adolescent affair – cute, thrilling, melancholic – a brief foray into real life. They ended after the show as the barriers of the single-sex boarding school were reimposed. The only real victim was the Gilbert and Sullivan, in my memory always appalling, for the simple reason that none of the chorus had joined for the singing.