Life in a Fascist State
Tales from my boarding-school days.
W. H. Auden once remarked, “The best reason I have for opposing fascism is that at school I lived in a fascist state.” I used to cite this often: my own all-girls’ boarding school—at least from my admittedly jaded perspective—was a cross between the army, a nunnery, a prison and the island of Lord of the Flies. This characterisation isn’t quite accurate. I do not remember ever feeling real fear of anything that might happen at school. There was no extreme brutality, no tortures, no dread. And—unlike life in fascist state—I was always comforted by the knowledge that at some point school would end and the rest of my life would begin.
In many ways, I think I was lucky that school was an all-female environment. Outside of juvenile penitentiaries and secure psych wards, girls don’t tend to beat each other up. And, while a few of our housemistresses had a mildly creepy manner, outright sexual abuse of children is also much rarer among our sex. I do remember one housemistress, who referred to us as her “little birds.” Her favourite task was telling girls about The Facts of Life, which she preferred to impart one on one. She would creep into the dorm after lights out on theatrical tippy-toes, with one finger to her pursed lips miming a need for secrecy, and plop her plump body down by the bedside of that night’s victim, whom she would inform, in a sing-song voice, about menstruation, pregnancy and sexual intercourse, while gently stroking the girl’s hair. Finally, she would gently placing a couple of panty liners and an applicator tampon on the bedside table. “I’ll just leave these there,” she’d say, “for when you need them,” patting the little pile for gentle emphasis. At the time, I found her behaviour painfully embarrassing and I tutted inwardly at the fact that most of us had already started our periods and were in no need of her guidance. Now, in retrospect, she seems mildly paedophile-coded. But she was not a threat and, as far as I know, no one suffered more a bit of shame at her attentions.
School—unlike a fascist state—is clearly temporary. There’s a clear end-date to look forward to. I was always comforted by the knowledge that at some point this would end and the rest of my life would begin.
However, the school definitely did have a few things in common with an authoritarian state. For one thing, the school’s prefect system entailed older girls exercising power over younger ones and this power was often exercised in completely arbitrary ways. Giving some children authority over others is rarely a good idea. When I was thirteen, I read William Golding’s novel The Lord of the Flies, scrunched up in a ball against the cold, gripping the radiator, in one of the window seats in our school library. I will never forget the thrill of recognition. This leafy campus in the London suburbs was our jungle island. I never became a prefect myself, never put on what I, with the histrionic sensibility of a stroppy teenager, thought of as the jack boots.
Perhaps the worst physical thing to happen to me at school was a “boot-room bashing,” as we called it, though it took place not in the actual boot room—though we had one, complete with metal scraper to remove stubborn mud from our boot soles—but in a downstairs cloakroom with exposed heating pipes that burned your hands if you unwarily grasped hold of them. Despite the sinister possibilities for scalding people that the room’s odd climbing-frame structure of pipework suggested, as far as I know, that never happened. It certainly never happened to me.
Instead, what took place in that boot room, in a weird parodic version of something out of the show Benny Hill, was that your bottom would get pinched. I was subjected to the full version of this only once. Two girls held my arms while a third knelt down behind me and, with vicious little fingernails, pinched my flat prepubescent buttocks hard about a dozen times. The physical pain was made worse by the taunts. According to girlhood lore, this treatment would destroy the elasticity of your skin forever. Once pinched, a bottom could never regain its bounce; you’d be a saggy buttocks for life. I didn’t fully believe this—but nor was I confident enough to be certain it was untrue. I quietly vowed that I would never go to Italy—a land where, I had heard, you couldn’t walk down the street without men pinching your buttocks a dozen times per block. Our buttock-pinching wasn’t sexual, though: it was pure sadism, a nasty little sting. It happened to me a few times outside the boot room too. You had to be careful how you stood and who you stood next to, if you didn’t want a girl’s pincer fingers to land on your fleshy parts like a human horse fly and administer a nasty sting.
Another aspect of totalitarian rule is, of course, the arbitrariness of its punishments. The clearest example of this at school happened during my first few years, under a housemistress who loved her fire drills. With the casual unkindness of the young, we nicknamed her The Toad. She had two large dogs—whose glossy fur we were not allowed to touch—who had been trained to bark at the sound of a man’s footsteps (The Toad always pronounced that word as if it were written in italics.) We had a regimen of chores to do. The younger girls would have to weed the “patio” (a crazy-paved area that divided each schoolhouse from the semi-circular lawn we called the garth). It was unpleasant work, tugging the long tap-roots of dandelions out from between the gaps in the paving stones. It was hard to get a purchase on the slippery stalks and our knuckles would be skinned by the rough edges of the concrete. But at least it was obvious when the task had been done: no one was going to replant dandelions into those narrow crevices.
Our nighttime task was easier to undo. We had to empty the small dustbins in the prep room and TV room (so-called even though there was no TV in there and we weren’t allowed to watch telly anyway). After they had been emptied, they had to be lined with newspaper, which was to be carefully folded over the rim of each dustbin like the beginnings of an origami swan. Then the empty bins were hoisted up onto the top of our lockers (which didn’t lock, of course, since you were not allowed to have any secrets from Matron) and we younger girls trooped upstairs, as we had to be ready by for our bedtime inspection by 8.30pm, before lights out at 9. But since the older forms didn’t have to go to bed for another hour, the older girls would toss their snotty tissues and sweet wrappers nonchalantly into the already-emptied bins. And when The Toad came round for her nighttime inspection, she would find those bins unemptied. And, as punishment, she would call a fire drill later that night.
In my memory, this happened most nights—though it can’t have been that often. I do know that on one particular freezing night, we had three fire drills at half-hour intervals. At some point in the small hours, our dreams would be interrupted by an earsplitting ringing, like an old-fashioned bell but at ten times the usual volume. The fluorescent ceiling lights would be flicked on at once and we’d stumble downstairs half-blinded, pulling arms through terrycloth dressing gowns and shuffling on slippers as we went, out onto the grass of the garth, to line up in number order (we were assigned numbers at the beginning of each year, based on height; in my first year, I was one of the very shortest and assigned the number three). My toes would slowly grow numb as the damp from the grass seeped through the cloth of my slippers. “Step forward Number Three!” The Toad declaimed on one unlucky night when I was the scapegoat. “Girls,” she thundered, emitting a cloud of frozen breath, “we are here right now because This One did not empty her bin!”
She must surely have known what was actually happening, have realised that we younger girls were not simply refusing to empty the bins as an act of pure defiance.
I don’t mean to imply by any of this that I was traumatised by my school years. As I’ve mentioned here before, I was remarkably immune to teasing and bullying. I took a snobbish attitude towards the other girls (and towards most of the teachers and staff, too). I genuinely didn’t care about so many of the things that the other pupils at my school seemed to be obsessed with: fashion and make up, cigarettes, pop music and boys. Every year, on Old Girls’ Day, when the school filled with nostalgic former pupils, our schoolhouse was abuzz with gossip as the girls graded, critiqued and envied or pitied the adult women who were revisiting us, on the basis of two things alone: how thin (or otherwise) they were and whether or not any accompanying boyfriend or husband was fanciable. I didn’t care if I was despised by a group whose values seemed so shallow. I wasn’t a a dandelion poking my head out from amid slabs of crazy paving, waiting for a schoolgirl hard to twist and tug me out by the roots. I was a dormant seed, encased in a nut-hard integument, waiting for the right conditions to germinate.