Would you really go back to school?

Yes, your school uniform when you were in school, KatiePie & Biting Lip, most likely were less than attractive.

But now that you are both adults, and back-in-school, I think the image of you both standing pigeon toed, nervously biting your lip and clutching the large pink PUNISHMENT PASS in your trembling hands as you sweated bullets outside of the Headmaster's office would be most alluring indeed.

If I spied you there, I'd be sure to stop, and ask you both if you were wearing the proper school knickers.

Well, are you? What color?

I don't ask for myself, or out of any sort of prurient interest, but the Headmaster doesn't like it one bit when the girls he are bout to punish aren't wearing proper knickers. And make no mistake about it no matter how old you are, the uniforms you think are so AWFUL clearly identify you as schoolgirls, as much as the passes identify you as naughty hellions in need of a stern correction!

We didn't have school uniform, but I can't recall much in the way of outlandish clothing except when we got a new Head in my final year who introduced it. As we were in our final year we didn't have to wear uniform but the boys had to wear a tie, not necessarily a school one. Cue all sorts of vile ties in protest, (mine was powder blue knitted nylon) culminating in the Head Boy no less, wearing a wide strip of carpet as a tie.

The high school I attended was demolished and re-built a few miles due to earthquake safety building codes. It didn't have much appeal back then and has zero now. I would not want to visit it. It looked more like a prison than a school.

There has often been very little difference between the two, in fact places like Eton, Winchester and Harrow were worse than many prisons not so long ago apparently.

I think both Orwell and Stephen Fry claimed that prison was more comfortable than public school. There's a book by Ysenda Maxtone Graham, 'Terms and conditions: life in girls' boarding schools' and she too claims that the food was worse and the conditions less comfortable in expensive boarding schools than in prisons.

The Guardian:
"Winchester College knew in 1982 about allegations of sadomasochistic abuse at the hands of John Smyth, a British QC who ran a series of Christian summer camps known as 'Bash camps'. "

And parents paid an absolute fortune to send their sons there to be flogged and abused by this sadistic tyrant.

And a very good read it is too. Useful, of course, for research purposes.


You conflate a little: the fortune was for the school fees, not, I believe, for the summer camp which involved only a very small percentage of seriously religious types. Smyth liked to single out masturbation as an especially thrashing-worthy sin, which was a pretty good bet with teenage boys.

[quote=TheEnglishMaster/quote]You conflate a little: the fortune was for the school fees, not, I believe, for the summer camp which involved only a very small percentage of seriously religious types.

To be fair, for the sort of wonga that the parents were dishing out, you would expect the school to have safeguarded against such people getting anywhere near the place. I believe their flogging regimes where pretty robust anyway, so maybe they didn't see his excesses as being too extreme?

The word 'safeguarding' hadn't been invented in 1980, though of course you're completely right that they should have done better. One could say the same about Sir Jimmy Saville, OBE, KCSG, Thatcher's friend who was touring the children's homes of Britain around the same time, seriously abusing kids. To the best of my knowledge, however, there was no CP at all at Winchester by 1980. Even in the late 60's it was becoming pretty rare. You have to go back quite a bit further for the 'flogging regimes' of which you speak.


And they're by no means alone. It's been a common refrain over the years, though how many claiming it have spent time in prison is another matter. Speaking from experience of boarding-school life, there are obvious similarities with how I imagine prison: you're effectively disallowed from leaving; your daily routine, much of which is boring and repetitive, is controlled almost to the minute by those in authority over you; the diet and accommodation aren't much to write home about (and even if you try, nothing happens!); you're stuck with large numbers of people of the same sex and class and watched over by the same; you know how long your sentence is (though admittedly boarding-school does allow 25% per annum for 'hols'). And finally, particularly aged 8 or so, there are the many quieter hours spent contemplating your guilt, for you must surely have done something terrible to be exiled from home like that.

Possibly boarding schools have moved on a lot since Orwell's time. Having been to one briefly, and having worked in one, while they didn't have particularly luxurious accommodation and while I think they are unhelpful for encouraging creativity and thinking for oneself, they lacked the constant threat of violence that is seen in TV prison dramas. Having never been in a prison I'm going to assume that the TV dramas (perhaps not Porridge but more Bad Girls and Orange is the New Black) are accurate.
I wasn't aware of any abuse while I was there. These things can be very subtle, though. It's only in retrospect that I can recognise the grooming and coercion that happened at my state day school.