So that’s me well and truly fucked for life…
Exhibit: John Redwood: Kent College independent public boarding school: 2 years ahead of me…
In this beginning, a studded and stencilled trunk arrives at a school just outside Canterbury at 10 miles an hour at a height of 5 feet. Strapped to the underside of the trunk is a green mini traveller (the particular shade that is the green equivalent of beige) with grandad-tooth woodwork. On the inside, a small boy and his parents. On the outside, a boarding school quadrangle gradually filling with fresh flesh, newly trousered and coated for the first day of term. The boy (11) would later lose his last hints of home as the mum-folded contents and aromas were decanted from the trunk before it was moved to storage.
Around 4.6 billion years ago, the solar system began to condense from the sun’s accretion disk, planets huddling around the star against the cold of interstellar space. Somewhat later, on a September Saturday in 1964, a small boy began to condense himself into a tiny ember of self-esteem around which he could huddle against the intense cold of interpersonal space. “Time is the school in which we learn, Time is the fire in which we burn”1. This was the school in which he burned for the next 7 years, imprisoned in a system designed to make men fit for the em-pyre.
This is the way things are. This is the way they should be, the way they must be. This is the way you must think, the way you must behave, the way you must conform. If you don’t change yourself to fit, you’re dead. For one contemporary, by dangling on a school scarf in a toilet.
He had been to 4 different primary schools in Germany and the UK between the ages of 5 and 11 (army dad). Each time he’d had few problems fitting-in, was popular and found friends. This was different, lozenges v nitric acid. His role was decided in the first month. The self-elected peer group leaders cast him as the misfit, as the outsider and decreed that this role would be rigorously policed. As a result, he had no friends between the ages of 11 and 17. Literally. No. Friends. Zero.
During the first few weeks, Hussey had resisted and said he liked him anyway. Hussey was taken to a quiet place so he could be informed of the error of his ways. Sadly, he left after a term.
Back home for the first Christmas post-partum holiday, his parents had moved from Malvern to Manchester so he no longer knew anyone. Months later, they moved to Malaysia (Malvern, Manchester, Malaysia – a strangely alliterative sequence), making running away a decidedly more difficult proposition. As the end of that holiday (and every subsequent holiday) approached, physical symptoms added to the dread. The word “gnawing” seems the most accurate – it was as though some slow-moving relentless creature was gradually and deliberately gnawing its way through the wall of his stomach..
And no one must know.
Try to imagine what it is like to have no friends during those crucial formative years. Pause. Sorry, it’s nothing like that. Or that. Unless you’re actually 14 and awash with hormones, angst, anxiety and crowded loneliness, it’s virtually impossible to imagine. He lived through it and yet I still find it difficult to put myself in his place, to work out what it did to him. What it has done to me.
Meanwhile, shortly after that first Christmas, he’s just turned 12 and is trapped. He is self-harming, in the process of doing things to himself, emotionally crippling things, in an effort to survive. To survive being caught in a boy-trap where the more he struggled, the more it hurt. To survive boarding school, he was going to have to gnaw his own metaphorical fucking leg off. Perhaps the “metaphorical” is redundant…
One Sunday winter night after chapel, in an hour in which to be alone alone, and not just isolated amongst the pack, the lost boy is driven from the lights by rising anxiety, away from them all into the frost-filigreed moonlit January night. His footprint trail leads away from the pack to safety on the far side of the playing field. He presses his head against the dark side of a tree, pressing and pressing and pressing, embossing his forehead to give the pain an external form. He whimpers into the bark: “What are they doing to me?”.
He can feel the shape of himself being changed, and it hurts. It hurts and there is nothing he can do. He’s only 12. He doesn’t really understand, but he can feel himself deforming and knows that no-one must know about those feelings. No one. Later, as the cold air seeps into the cold within, he returns to the lights, to the toilet to wash his face in cold water, to wait until the last minute before he has to join the others for lights-out.
There’s only another 6 years to endure. How much of him will be left by then? As puberty dawns, he learns that, as he can’t defend himself and as no-one else would defend him, the only way to survive is to learn to pretend to be dead. Dead boys don’t feel. Dead boys can’t be killed.
So to the practicalities. Code a mind app, MindFuck version 1.0. Once you’ve written the algorithm, debugged the code (a slow, painful, aversion therapy process) and got it running in your brain, then perhaps you can survive. You’ve created a homunculus in your head that watches everything and everyone and then decides how you will react. You can no longer afford to have spontaneous emotional reactions. Even if you think you’re having one, a spontaneous feeling, you can no longer tell whether it’s real or just what a part of you decided you needed to feel at that moment, a simulation.
Where’s the off switch? Even now, I so wish there was on off-switch, or even a mute button.
One of the consequences of his actions is, like Pinocchio, I’ve never felt like a real boy. Similar to the well documented “imposter syndrome”, but instead of feeling I’ll be found out at work or in my career, I still sometimes feel as though I’ll be found out as a human being, as a father, as a lover, as a member of society. He had to find a way to create an emotional guillotine to put a reflex pause between whatever, whatever anyone said or did to him so he could decide how to react, or rather, not to react.
He was trained in this every, that’s every, day for year after year after year. If you react, it gets worse. Don’t react. Don’t ever react or show your lesions as then the feedback starts and you become a wounded wildebeest amidst a pack of hyenas.
I have two sons of my own. I watched them quite effortlessly being 12, 13, 14 and loved the process, their confidence and friends. But: it made me think again about myself at 12. The worst thing, the very worst thing looking back at him at that age, the thing that most makes me want to travel back to be Geppetto to that 12 year old boy, is that he knew what was happening, could feel what he was doing to himself. To survive he had to self-harm and he could feel himself doing it, like having to stay awake whilst carrying out surgery on yourself without anaesthetic. A psychologically multi-faceted boy was being hammered into a prescribed round hole, parts of himself being cut away by the hardened cultural die into which he was being forced.
Perhaps you feel that this is all somewhat exaggerated, that surely it can’t have been that bad. You’d be right, it wasn’t that bad – it was worse…
And here is some of the later.
The effects of his experiences live still in me, 50+ years on, despite counselling, despite a new and very loving relationship. They affect how I think and feel, how I behave. Less and less, it’s true, but it’s still there, that feeling of not being able to be who I should have been. And I’m someone who doesn’t swim daily in culturally polluted water, who doesn’t work in the public-school environment of Westminster, who doesn’t get a constant psychological reinforcement of unhealthy memes..
Throughout my adult life, I’ve had a recurring dream (several times a year) that leaves me subtly depressed for many days afterwards. I walk into a school/college/university student entry area as someone new. There are many others, moving purposefully, knowing where they are going, chatting in groups, preparing for classes. There’s a refectory and a coffee bar, but I don’t know where to go or where my classes are held. I ask and either no-one admits to knowing or they don’t respond. I go looking for my lecture room, moving increasingly quickly and desperately as I get more and more late, corridor after corridor, staircase after staircase until, finally, I find it – just in time to catch the end of the class.
Into the canteen to sit alone and eat alone whilst everyone else is talking, groups coalescing and splitting like social amoeba under biology class microscopes. Friendships. I walk all over the campus, looking on and watching – but not interacting with – people. Then, slowly, the crowds thin like autumn morning mist, dissipating until there is no-one left.
Except me.
I realise the end of term has arrived and everyone else has diffused away to the comforts of friends and families leaving me to generate echoing footsteps alone along empty paths surrounded by empty buildings carrying my empty soul in my empty hands. Night begins to fall like a cold, dark cloud. I have woken, depressed, from variations on this theme for decades.
I sometimes wonder: what could these dreams mean? How could you interpret what’s in them? Irony mode cancel.
I am delusional. Parts of me, elements of my behaviour are illusions, illusions that I have free will and make reasonable decisions based on what is happening now. In reality, along one winding contour of personality I react and behave as I do according to the needs and rules of the boy in my head and then create a plausible, but nonsense, narrative to explain why after the event. We all bullshit ourselves to varying degrees.
It’s like dicing onions. You have a wooden chopping board slathered in onion choppings that you sweep (with considerable panache) into life’s frying pan using the knife with the green handle. A single shard of onion clips the edge of the pan and flips onto the hob surface.
Without thinking, you reach to push it from under the cast iron grid and the gas flame licks the tip of a finger. You react with mongoose fast finger withdrawal. Afterwards, you tell yourself that you pulled your finger away because it was hot. You lie. Actuality: the withdrawal was a reflex with no cognition involved, no decisions, no “I”. Later, you make up a narrative for the event. “I, [enter name here], did at [enter time here], withdraw my finger from the gas flame, because it was Jesus Christ hot.” I, Peter Wilson, avoided saying, said, got married to, felt depressed, reacted badly, didn’t do, did do, withdrew, decided to, decided not to, remained, left, dum-de-dum-de-dum etc etc. Because, because, because, because…
I did not. Many of the becauses were and are after the event inventions, reassuring rationalisations in an attempt to find some coherent reasons for my behaviour. Bloody convincing they were too because:
a) I’m intelligent and articulate
and
b) I’ve had a fuck of a lot of practice
It isn’t reassuring to realise that many life changing decisions I made and actions I took were determined by what that 12 year old boy needed in that moment, by the mechanisms he put in place to survive. A reflex, no cognition involved, my current narrative just post hoc justification bollocks.
The sliver of uncooked, lonely onion left on the hob shrivels in the pan reflected heat.
Loyal. So very loyal. Stupidly, cripplingly loyal. To have a relationship with someone, to have a friend has often trumped everything in my life, even when it was psycho-toxic and destructive. I’ve put up with behaviour that no-one should endure because of this deeply embedded need to be loyal, clinging desperately to some sense of connection, even when the connection was acid.
In the darkness from outside the firelit social circle, he watched their behaviour, their bullying, their cruelty. He watched, he experienced and set himself a mission to foster at least some sense of self-worth. He promised himself that he would not be like them, he would never behave like them, he would be better than them. Even if only in his own head. Better than them. He would never repay an insult with an insult. He would never put someone down in public or private. He would never bully.
He would, of course, fail to meet these impossible standards, failings that added a fake tan sheen to his guilt. The very existence of this aspiration, however, gave him purpose and sprayed a hint of pride across his life. He would try to train himself to try to live up to a very long list of “nevers”. It wasn’t that difficult to make a start as the first step towards this aspiration could largely be met simply by never reacting – which was already becoming the standard operating procedure.
Elephantised
When training baby elephants for the circus, the first step is to ensure that they cannot escape. Insert serious peg in ground, add chain, add elephant leg. Leave elephant alone. Little elephant pulls and pulls until leg bleeds. Little elephant walks round and round creating a circular rut at the tether limit, hoping and hoping that it can walk far enough, far, far away and find a route that leads elsewhere. Eventually, the little beast comes to understand that there is no escape, no way out, ever. “Tethered” has become part of its world view. “Freedom” no longer exists.
Once that understanding has been reached, even a length of string will restrain that elephant with no fear it will escape. It has lost the ability to visualise the concept of “freedom”. It knows there is no escape so it can no longer even try.
They baby elephantise him with myriad fine social chains linked to an anchored cultural peg. He is a Gulliver, trapped by a host of gossamer cultural threads woven into a hawser. Parental expectation chains, peer group chains, societal chains, location chains. He gives up thinking things can change, that his life could be different. He just walks round and round in his head, finally accepting there is no way out.
“Learned helplessness” (1) had been installed.
Plastic knight
Decades later, my therapist was trying to persuade me to look at the way I see myself without engaging intellect. She gave me a box of plastic figurines and told me to choose one without thinking. I chose a little plastic armoured knight, down on one knee, protecting himself by holding a shield over his head. A little boy had tried to create a sense of honour in himself, something he could hang onto, to attempt to live up to. Ideas of nobility or chivalry, even if just within his own mind.
I chose the little plastic knight from the box, the little armoured plastic knight, the little armoured plastic knight down on one knee holding up a shield. As I stood him on the table, an emotional cyst ruptured and I wept, wept for that little boy who tried so hard, wept for me and for my distorted life.
I have two degrees, I’m the technical director of two engineering companies and have several patents to my name. I’m a very popular speaker at conferences as I’m not only extremely knowledgeable, but since I also perform occasional stand-up comedy and poetry at open microphone events as a hobby, I can be entertaining. So, on the outside, a public performer; emotional intelligence (as long as it’s only applied to others), tick; supportive husband and friend, tick; sporting, tick; entertaining and seemingly popular, tick.
On the outside.
But, on the inside, tic, tic, tic, tic…
The “it never did me any harm” cohorts downplay the long-lasting effects of boarding schools and the psychological damage they have inflicted on children. In some ways, I got off lightly but I’m self-aware enough to know that substantial elements of my behaviour are still in thrall to those days.
Apparently, being beaten with a cricket bat is “character building” (it was a length of 2-by-1 timber in one case I know – the perpetrator trading the better grip of a cricket bat for the welts raised by the sharper corners of the timber). Children torn from home at 8: “taught her independence”. Being sexually abused by adults: “just part of my education”. Bullied with no hope of respite: “made a man of me”. These and other common ex-boarder self-delusions are subconscious defences against engaging with the feelings of the desperate child inside.
They are total bullshit. Of course it did us harm.
Look up the behaviour of the members of the Bullingdon Club for example, including very senior ex-public-school scions later to become politicians. Even Boris Johnson (yes, even him), who was a member and became the actual leader of the country (WTF), said it was “a truly shameful vignette of almost superhuman undergraduate arrogance, toffishness and twittishness.” Note the language, note the behaviour and consider: just how damaged are these people and how much damage can they inflict on the rest of us?
Behaviours and habits adopted by that 12 year old to survive are no longer appropriate for an adult living in a different time and a different world. Discuss.
I know and understand that my behaviour has been massively affected by that inner boy. His needs and desires have truly determined the arc of my life and important elements of my character. I have made (retrospectively) disastrous decisions that, whilst in actuality they were based on his needs, at the time I generated seemingly (to me) convincingly rational narratives to explain to myself why it was I (and not he) making them.
What about those who enter the Westminster asylum voluntarily, feeding those so familiar, but unhealthy, psychological habits?
As for some of my behaviours that I can absolutely ascribe to the consequences of his boarding school life:-
Male bonding: WTF, no idea. Completely missed out on that. I feel uncomfortable in typical all male groupings as I was never initiated, watching those rites of passage as an outsider looking in from the darkness beyond the social firelight. For a start, I’m something of a pervert as I don’t give a shit about football or many of the other excuses for not saying how you feel because it isn’t male or macho enough. Consequently, I’ve always preferred the company of the alternative female species as they had played no part in my adolescent conditioning.
Parties: I’m generally outgoing and engaged at parties, enjoying the socialising and conversations, meeting new people and being part of the buzz. But sometimes, at some point, subtle subliminal social buttons are pushed. I end up standing in the corner of the kitchen, the corner that’s installed between the fridge and the drinks table, completely alone and isolated in my head with a desperate desire to hide, to go home, to be alone.
Confrontations/assertiveness: all relationship issues (disagreements, arguments, someone getting upset) are automatically my fault and I lie awake at night using my massive expertise in rumination to go over and over the whys and hows and constructing rational arguments to convince myself that it can’t all be my fault. Emotionally I don’t believe me for a second as I’m fundamentally worthless. I’ve spent much of my life being surprised that anyone likes me, let alone loves me.
Self-justification: I’ve been left with a powerful tendency to feel I have to justify, both morally and intellectually, every single one of my thoughts and my actions. It’s an emotional imposter syndrome that constantly plagues me with suspicions that my feelings are not real. Someone confides in me, finding me to be an attentive and supportive listener – and is demonstrably grateful. In response, my HeadTube streams a series of storylines about whether I really cared (despite the “real” emotions I felt at the time) or was it just an act to present myself as a caring person to get the dopamine hit from a good review.
Ditto giving lifts to people to places miles out of my way. Ditto writing a heart-felt letter to a friend in need. Ditto making romantic gestures. Ditto helping a stranger on a psychiatric ward. Ditto, ditto, ditto and ditto fucking ditto.
What’s a team? I’m not a natural team player (serious understatement). If anything, I’m more of a very unnatural part of any unit due to a form of group-based-autism whereby I can look-on, but can’t quite bring myself to partake in the gestalt. I’ve always had a serious dislike of depending on others because, deep down, I know it is a law of nature that they will use me and then either through omission or commission leave me to pick up the pieces of myself.
In my working life, this has had the ramification that I expect people to be self-motivated and to just get on with the job – which makes me somewhat crap as a manager. I hate confrontation or the thought of being assertive when it comes to the human relationship side of work, taking hints of dissatisfaction far too much to heart.
Arrogance: I can be intellectually arrogant when it comes to discussions about logic and facts (and religion…). Not very endearing (or surprising), but all the other defence mechanisms in the classroom had already been taken: class bully, class comic, class bully, class buffoon, class bully, class swat, another class bully…
Rational thought, logic, facts were not matters of opinion. So a 14 year old could sit alone in a cold field reading “The Naked Ape”, drinking cider and listing things about which he had been right so that he could get at least a little intellectual satisfaction and feel a tiny sliver of self-esteem (even if he could no longer feel his nose).
This process taught him critical double-thinking skills.
Think 1: look for the discrepancies or assumptions in the beliefs of his fellows and seek out the factual evidence that they are wrong. It is very important to his guttering self-worth to know and to be able to prove that they are wrong.
Think 2: judge them for their foolishness and climb atop the tiny, tiny intellectual pedestal he has created from whence to look down upon them (internally only), for lo, his tormentors are stupid or ignorant. This mindset is still a constant temptation.
Oxbridge stream in the 6th form and he was actually allowed, nay encouraged, to take people apart in debate. So he did, as it could in no way be described as bullying…
Get to the fucking point: (please!): the modest intellectual “superpower” gifted me by genetics, and opportunity, honed by catching up with different school curricula as a child is that I am very quick on the uptake. Whether it’s software, hardware, plumbing, medical, physics – or even wetware on occasion. I can’t watch Youtube explanations, they seem to play back in slo-o-w—w—w motion, sucking the will to live out through my eyes. Why watch a 6-minute video when I can scan the transcript for what I need to understand in 40 seconds?
Interview for my first job (highly technical engineering consultancy): the manager has a deliberately difficult (and actual) technical problem that he uses to work out how you think and whether you have the ability he is looking for. If you fail this test, you fail the interview. It usually takes 20 – 30 minutes. I’m done in under 10. This leaves him (with his very few social skills) trying to fill the remaining 20 minutes with unprepared content. I land the job.
The corollary of this ability is that I live in a world of mansplanations – work, TV documentaries, social media… People explaining step by step by (OK, I’ve got it) step by (is there more?) step by (apparently so) step by (Jesus, please stop) step by fucking (please save me) step.
Living in this world can be seriously frustrating with feelings of frittering time, frittering attention that is the most precious of commodities, frittering of life. I interrupt far more often than is socially acceptable. Rude.
Dadness: being a good enough dad. Massively important to me. I’ve oft been told I have been good enough, and whilst I have no problem believing that intellectually, there’s a voice in my head saying “Really? You? How can you be sure? That was your friend/son/brother telling you that, maybe they were just being kind. What about that mistake, and that, and that. You could and should have done better, better, better…”
I’m to blame: everything is my fault. Seriously. Everything. This is a very deep and powerful irrational belief that is an emergent property of the psychological effects of his incarceration. There was a significant head start in this indoctrination in that our parents were old school when it came to responsibility and “doing your duty”. As the older brother (by nearly three years), my younger sibling, David, was often my responsibility – and one I took very seriously. On occasion it turned out that my responsibility even extended to events that occurred when he was off somewhere else, a psionic liability that extended across time and space.
Continuous ostracism (except when being blamed for some societal error) and deprecation of who he was and of what he did (an automatic cultural behaviour for almost everyone after the first few months of school conditioning) ground down his sense of self-worth to the thinnest of veneers. Combined with the inflated responsibility meme meant he felt he must be responsible for their behaviour, that they must be right (the wisdom of crowds – unclean, unclean) and that it must all be his fault.
It is hard to recover from the effects of being rejected by everyone you know, every day, for year after year after formative year.
And, sometimes, he panics…: events below the level of consciousness, stress from external factors and life events. Someone close being critical can collude with a feeling of having done something wrong and the boy is very triggered, caroming round the inside of my cranium in panic, faster and faster, trapped, each reverberation amplifying his fear of rejection, of being alone. Again. Deservedly out-cast out mummy and daddy won’t help me befriend none of my peers into my soul found wanting to be loved her betrayal of promises to be a good boy that hurts so much pain full of needs must escape is impossible to stop the feedback process that eliminates all rationality…
I can feel his panic but there is nothing I can do to stop him throwing himself from side to side inside my head. I can only grip as tight as I can, like a free climber on an emotional cliff as he threatens to precipitate us from a precarious perch. But, sometimes, we fall…
…and when we fall: some time ago, an argument with my partner triggered a mind-killing avalanche as my defensive dams gave way and he burst through like a dead child at a seance. Counselling was partly to blame as hard-won re-evaluations had weakened the protective walls he’d built.
And on Saturday 25 Feb 2017, 4 years after Decree Absolute, after a series of events had weakened the barriers round the boy in my head enough for him to break through, he ran screaming through my mind. Numb first. Sat on the cold floor next to the front door. A slow, inexorably feeling of rising despair, of broken, of worthlessness. A vast pressurised well of pent-up emotions is finally pierced by the drill-bit of maturity and circumstance.
Tears, sobbing and then anger and screaming and beating and beating my forehead with my fists to give physical form to the unbearable emotional pain. My hands hurt. My bruised forehead hurts. That’s just the way it is. It hurts, it hurts, it always hurts, and I am not allowed to express it. I AM NOT ALLOWED. And I am 64 years old.
This is what I wrote the day after to describe the experience to myself in an attempt to push it “outside my head” so I could look at it and try to deal with it…
“I cracked up. Big.
All the times I’ve sucked up the hurt, the pain, the injustice. Partly because I have to be not like them, better, don’t be angry like them, don’t be cruel like them, don’t get upset like them, don’t retaliate like them. Not allowed. So I learned how to suppress, to control reactions. It became habit. Inherent in that habit was the implication that my feelings did not matter as much as those of others, that they couldn’t be as bad, as damaging, as painful or as felt. Everyone else is allowed to be unreasonable, to be angry, to be hurt and to hurt. I am not. I learned that I am not.
My wife played on that, made use of that. She made sure that the consequences of my reacting, of me daring to show how I felt were so high as to be felt to be an insurmountable barrier. It was my fault. Always my fault. And she used the boys as weapons to hurt me, to make me hurt. They see her upset and angry, screaming that I’m a useless cripple and worse than Hitler. They see me calm and trying to placate, or asking why, or trying to explain why it wasn’t like that. So, who is in the wrong? When you’re 7 and 3, who is in the wrong? The appearance is that dad has badly upset mum. Why has he done that? When you’re 20 and psychotic due to skunk and 16 (going on A levels) and your mother is screaming that your dad is a bastard and that she can’t stand it anymore and is leaving, what do you feel?
In reality, she felt guilty because I had found out she had been having an affair and had quietly asked her about it. So she is angry with me for making her feel guilty. Her behaviour hadn’t made her feel guilty, my finding out was the cause of the guilt – so I must be punished. It’s not the fact she has had an affair, it’s the fact that she uses the boys as weapons because she knows that is the most hurtful fucking thing that she can do. And I am reasonable and quiet and placatory and, as a consequence of her abuse, I end up cycling round town in the rain at midnight looking for my mentally unstable son who had run from the house to escape her rage.
And I am not allowed. Not allowed to say what I feel in the heat of the moment. To shout that she is the one who’s had the affair, fucked my feelings, fucked my life. Because I don’t want to fuck up her relationship with the boys, because it might damage them, because the oldest is psychotic and the youngest is doing A levels. Because I am not allowed. My place is to absorb it all, to suck it up, to take it, to endure. Because, through long habit, I can and I must. Because my feelings are simply not as real as those of everyone else and because my feelings have little value.
Imagine the lengths to which a seriously Etoned minister embedded in the Westminster boarding school would go to avoid feelings like these. How much of our money would they spend in attempting to satisfy the deeply entrenched needs that are always there? How much resource would they waste on post hoc justification rather than admission?
Me? With a nod to the poet, Delmore Schwartz…(2) I also wrote:-
Not Allowed
School’s the time in which I learned
School’s the fire in which I burned
I was not allowed to feel the hurt
No view for me, just desert
I sobbed inside my mental shroud
But not aloud, just not out loud
I’m not allowed to join my peers
I’m not allowed to show my fears
I’m not allowed to scream out loud
I’m not allowed to leave the crowd
I’m not allowed to cry at night
As tears just amplify the spite
I’m not allowed to show I’m weak
As that’s the feedback that they seek
To cut and cull me from the herd
I can’t afford to say a word
A schoolboy learns he’s not allowed
To feel a fucking thing out loud
A schoolboy learns he must be wood
A boy to burn as he’s no-good
Boarding school and dad has gone
He’s just 11, he’s missed his mum
He learns his life is not his own
He turns himself to wood and stone
Response is what they needed to
Inflict their pain on someone who
Is not allowed to retaliate
A dead boy walking, intestate
His feelings made a foreign land
Down all the years he’s held my hand
I’ve been Geppetto to that child
That wooden boy who’s still exiled
Whose soul was shaped, whose heart was cowed
Real men cry, but I’m not allowed
Marriage – a time in which I learned
Marriage – a fire in which I burned
I’m not allowed to be who I am
I’m not allowed to be that man
I am allowed to self-control
As she sells my self and sells my soul
For what she wants and what she needs
Oblivious to the pain she feeds
I’m not allowed to defend myself
Despite the toll on mental health
Our sons are pawns she uses to
Inflict her guilt on someone who
Is not allowed to retaliate
A dead man walking, intestate
A husband learns he’s not allowed
To feel a fucking thing out loud
A husband learns he must be wood
A man to burn as he’s no-fuck-ing-good
It. Never. Did. Me. Any. Fucking. Harm.
Reunion
After 43 years, a reunion. Forty – three – years. One of the experiences at the reunion was the event that triggered this tome. We were being given a guided tour of the school by a 6th form girl (“Girl.” Good god, a girl – inside the school! Weird with a capital K).
At one point, at the location of an old dormitory, F (now a significant actor) told a well-rehearsed and crafted story about how he’d been caught talking after lights out and had been taken out by the supply teacher to be beaten with a 2-by-1 balk of timber in preference to the more usual cane or slipper. [“Such fresh young flesh, my god! Such power I have, shock of wood on thigh and buttock through my hand. Welts rising like my own tumescence…”]. This raised sufficiently unbelievable weals and bruises on buttocks and legs as to elicit awed comments from even assault-hardened fellow inmates.
During the telling of his story, however, I happened to be looking at a younger woman in the group, in her 40s, presumably the parent of a much subsequent generation of pupil. The look of shock and horror on her face brought home to me just how much we had accepted the normalisation of such violent behaviour by the school culture. My fellow reunionees, on the other hand, were listening, remembering, laughing, commenting and treating it as a totally “to be expected” experience.
Not massively unusual. Not child abuse. Not assault and battery by an adult with a weapon. Not sadistic sexual gratification. An unconscious re-framing of experiences that would have horrified any of us if it happened to our children. It did not, however, horrify us that it had happened to the children that we were.
Never did us any harm.
We had been impressed into a combination of school-imposed culture (the tip of the iceberg) coupled with a strictly enforced inmate sub-culture handed down from year to year. The generic boarding school conditioning is very evident in the way that Westminster is set up and run. To imagine that the denizens of that august place are immune from the conditioning and pressures is fantasy. If an MP was educated in the system, it will appear very familiar and normal – and that’s a large proportion of them. In 2017, 29% of MPs were privately educated and 10% went to Eton. Eton – you can’t get a much more elite boarding school than that.
Even MPs who weren’t previously infected with that cultural ethos will still find themselves living, breathing and being changed by the unhealthy conditioning. It does and will change their behaviour and the way they think to a greater or lesser extent, because that was what it was and is designed to do.
Parliament is steeped in cultural traditions that haven’t changed in generations. A substantial proportion of those traditions are pure boarding school. If you feel that’s a little far-fetched, just compare the workings of the place with those of any modern company. For example, it was only in 2018 (nothing to see here until 2018, two thousand and eighteen…) that Parliament started to set up a behavioural code and a complaints and grievance procedure following massive publicity over bullying and sexual harassment. And I quote: “The Independent Complaints and Grievance Policy (ICGP) Steering Group is overseeing key workstreams in response to the ICGP Working Group’s report on inappropriate behaviour, bullying and sexual harassment in Westminster”.(3)
Who’d have thought, a “culture of harassment and bullying”. Classic boarding school. Hence, finally, the need to draw up a code of expected conduct as to the way MPs should treat fellow human beings. You would hope that, in a healthy society, this should not have been a necessary step to try to persuade the people running the country to treat others well…
Apparently, quite a few of them have to be taught to behave decently as 20% of people working in Parliament had experienced or witnessed sexual harassment or inappropriate behaviour in 2018. While that’s a very disturbing figure for a place like Parliament, the equivalent rate in old fashioned boarding schools would be 100% (and that’s not for the past year, but just for the past week).
Many parliamentarians have MindFuck 9.1 app (or later) running in their heads. A significant proportion are running the paid-for Eton add-in that’s guaranteed both ad and insight free.
“Never did them any harm…”
And now for his story, the boy with a limp. The boy who continues to have such power in my life, despite my best efforts and despite the fact that he left the asylum at 18, I still talk with his limp…
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
- Delmore Schwartz: Calmly we walk through this April’s day
- https://www.parliament.uk/mps-lords-and-offices/offices/bicameral/independent-complaints-grievance-policy/