When I was a child in the 1960s, my father was a professor of philosophy in Montreal, Canada. During his first sabbatical, he met another professor of philosophy at another university who was a graduate of [a public school] in London. My father’s new friend told him if he wanted me to get a good education he should send me [there]. If I did well, he told my parents, getting into Oxford or Cambridge would be no problem. He had done it himself a decade earlier. My parents bought into the idea – lock, stock, and barrel. As a six-year-old, I had no idea what my parents were conspiring to do with me.
By the time my father had his second sabbatical, my parents were divorced and I went with my father to London. He did his philosophy research while I prepared with a tutor for the gruelling two-and-a-half-day-long entrance exam. I bombed. My father sent me to a ‘cramming school’. The preparation was excellent. I succeeded on my second attempt and the Housemaster was willing to accept me. In September 1976, I left my parents in Canada and flew to London. I was just shy of my fourteenth birthday.
Being a Canadian boarder at [an English public school] was like being in another world. The daily routine was unlike anything I had ever imagined. Before classes, the whole school would walk through the medieval cloisters and attend a service. After classes, our ‘free time’ was taken up by extracurricular activities. Supper was in a medieval refectory during which I was required to assume the role of ‘toast fag’ in scheduled shifts with the other new boys in my dorm. Prep time was from 7.15 to 9.00 pm. Lights out at 10.00 pm. For sports, I rowed on the Thames. We had school six days a week. On Saturdays, after school the boarders would go home for the ‘weekend’ and return Sunday night. Only a small minority stayed over the weekend. I was one of them. Throughout the school year, I only saw my parents at Christmas.
At first, I looked forward to getting settled in and integrating myself with my fellow housemates and classmates. However, it did not take me long before some sort of change happened in me that was unsettling. I did not understand it at the time, and I was unsure of what to do about it. I increasingly felt that I had been abandoned in a foreign orphanage. The separation from my parents contributed to an increasing sense of alienation from them and everyone else. I tried to enjoy whatever free time I had, and I attended concerts by the Rolling Stones, Peter Frampton, and Pink Floyd. I started to smoke cigarettes, drank in pubs, and had my first exposure to cannabis.
Notwithstanding the excitement of being in London without parental supervision, I became increasingly despondent and depressed. While I portrayed a confident exterior and sought to give the impression that I was mature and ‘cool’, on the inside I increasingly suffered from anxiety and insecurity. My deteriorating mental health manifested itself in a downward spiral in my studies and corresponding marks. I found it extremely difficult to concentrate for any length of time on any school material and increasingly lost interest. None of my teachers was inspiring or motivating. I held my own in French class, but every other subject was a source of frustration and my marks tanked. Towards the end of the year, I wrote to my mother that the teachers were nice to me, but none of them cared and my Housemaster never enquired about my well-being beyond a superficial “How are you?” in the hallway which generated the inevitable “Fine, thanks” response.
When I returned home in July 1977, I begged my father not to send me back as I assumed that I would have to repeat a year. My wish was granted. My expedition to [London] was a failure, and I felt like one on my return. My relationship with my parents never got back on track. For decades afterward, I seemed to struggle with the enduring legacy of that experience.
When the Canadian government established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2008 to study the impact that ‘residential schools’ had had on Canada’s indigenous population, the media consistently reported horrifying stories of abuse and trauma. I was prompted to re-examine my experience [in London] and its impact on my life. In the process of researching the history of [the school] and English ‘Public Schools’, I came across the works of Nick Duffell and Dr Joy Schaverien and their discussions of Strategic Survivor Personality and Boarding School Syndrome. How grateful I am to those two authors for helping me to understand who I am! I also researched the field of ‘writing therapy’ and subsequently endeavoured to write an autobiographical account of my experience and its impact on my life. To describe the writing process as a cathartic experience would be an understatement.