I’m the first to admit I’ve had a sheltered life. I grew up in the country and went to a boarding school. It was all just part of the business – be nice to everyone and all that.
Christmas Day itself hasn’t always been great. My parents went abroad when I was very young, and I went to boarding school. We had a few Christmases before that – I remember a big sack of presents and Mummy cooking goose.
My parents divorced when I was seven. Because divorce is messy, for good or ill, they sent me to boarding school.
I didn’t have boyfriends until my late teens. I was at a girls’ boarding school, and my stepfather disapproved of me going out with anybody. I never really came across any boys. When I did, one of them asked me out, and I was petrified. I felt like a fish out of water, and it was excruciating.
At this point I was strongly advised that I was too young socially to go to college so I took a second senior year at Andover, another boarding school.
My mum was working in London, so I went to school there until I was 12. But every holiday would be in Scotland, and when I went to boarding school, I’d either be there or Scotland.
I have a theory that if you’ve got the kind of parents who want to send you to boarding school, you’re probably better off at boarding school.
I went to boarding school, and what that teaches you is to cope emotionally at a young age and to suppress a lot of emotion. Being in the army is, in a way, similar.
I went to boarding school, and then I went to Oxford, and I know how easy it is for certain groups of people to become wholly insulated from ordinary life.
Keeping with our family tradition of sending their children abroad for a couple of years, and aware of my interest in chemistry, I was sent to a boarding school in Switzerland when I was 11 years old, on the assumption that German was an important language for a prospective chemist to learn.
I’m always represented as a bit of a class warrior – a bit Down With Men and Down With Middle-Class People. Whereas I’m actually very fond of men and am middle-class. I even went to boarding school in Perthshire.
I probably deserve a bit of a kicking. And having been to boarding school, I’ve learnt to enjoy a good beating.
My dream, I remember, when I went to boarding school, was to have a study all my own, a little nook someplace where nobody could get at me – nobody, like the football coach.
At boarding school you had to wear your name across your chest and your back, and obviously I had a pretty funny name. It wasn’t Brown or Smith or Hughes.
I went to boarding school from the age of eight – first to prep school, then to Eton. One thing that kind of education teaches you is community living: there’s little retreat. That’s why people come out of it and talk about lifelong friendships forged in the furnace.
My dad was in the Army. The Army’s not great pay, but, you know, we moved from Army patch to Army patch wherever that was. The Army also contributed to sending me off to boarding school.
When I was seventeen, I left Scotland to go to Kent, a well-to-do boarding school in Connecticut, where there was a contingent of really naughty kids.
I went to an all-girls boarding school for most of my youth.
There is a latent anger in a lot of people that went to boarding school at an early age. I was eight. And I loved it over the five years, but I think the adjustments for eight-year-olds are a lot. And I think it informs who you are for a long, long time.
I have been a frequent air traveler since I was a few months shy of my sixth birthday, when my parents packed me off to boarding school two plane rides away from home. Those days of being willingly handed from air hostess to air hostess as an ‘unaccompanied minor’ made me blase about the rigors of air travel.
I went to boarding school in Somerset and loved it so much that my teachers had to make me phone home when I first got there. Whenever I spoke to my mum, at the end of the call I would say, ‘Love you, Mum’, and she would say, ‘Love you the most.’
Actually, the British boarding school experience turns out to be not that exotic.
I went to an all-girls boarding school in Maryland. I used to laugh at the girls in the theater program – I was pre-med, National Honors Society; I was on that track.
When I was sixteen years old, I was sentenced to two years in prison; the Swedish government changed it, so I could go to a boarding school as part of a social programme. I was in this boarding school with some of the richest kids in Sweden.
I went through a period at boarding school when my coaches wanted me to switch to snowboarding because they thought I was no good at skiing. I was too skinny. I had terrible technique. They were saying I should be a snowboarder, and luckily, I resisted.
My boarding school experience was the only thing I had strong enough feelings to write about for hundreds and hundreds of pages. I can still smell the formaldehyde of the fetal pigs in biology.
At the senior prom for my Catholic boarding school, I was feeling manly, so I shaved, even though I didn’t need to. Being inexperienced, I managed to slice a quarter-inch gash into my lower chin a half hour before I picked up my date.
I have a brilliant memory of being driven back to school when ‘Super Trouper’ was number one in the charts in 1980. When it came on the radio my mum just drove right past the school gates! When you’re 11 years old and meant to be going back to boarding school, that’s a great feeling.
When I was 12, I went to boarding school, where I discovered the computer, which meant I no longer had to write something down and get someone to play it, I could just type it into the computer and hear it back.
His daughter returned from her boarding school, improved in fashionable airs and expert in manufacturing fashionable toys; but, in her conversation, he sought in vain for that refined and fertile mind which he had fondly expected.
Besides, I think that when one has been through a boarding school, especially then, you have some resistance, because it was both fine comradeship and a fairly hard training.
American fantasy is not a genre we think about too often. Sure, we are familiar with the worlds of English boarding school houses and castles and fairies, but true American fantasy, fantasy that is built on the land of this country, is hard to come by.
At age 10 or 12 he’s going to boarding school in the Isle of Wight. The Isle of Wight is, of course, down at the bottom of England just off South Hampton.
The only place I considered home was the boarding school, in Yorkshire, my parents sent me to.
I think boarding school does give you an independence.
Boarding school in Tring was a bit of a bubble that burst when I went to Hackney to go to drama school.
I didn’t play a great deal of sport in primary school. It was not until I went away to boarding school in Sussex that I really got into sport.
My musical influences growing up were limited to Korean folk songs and hymns as I went to a Christian boarding school where I was not allowed to listen to secular music.
When I came back to Mumbai after boarding school, I was 16 and I picked up weight training and yoga. This is when I also started dance classes and Pilates and then I started doing different workouts every month. I am now proficient in kick boxing, gymnastics, classical dance as well as yoga.
Any institution becomes a community – whether it’s a high school or a boarding school or a publishing company or a small town where everybody knows certain things about people.
The only thing I wanted when I left school was independence. I had been at boarding school for many years. When you’re boarding, nothing is your own and your whole day is scheduled. You’re told when to sleep, what to eat and when. You have zero independence.
I was not a classic mother. But my kids were never palmed off to boarding school. So, I didn’t bake cookies. You can buy cookies, but you can’t buy love.
I spent half my life in a boarding school where we were shown only the sporadic wholesome classic like ‘The Sound Of Music.’ So, I am not familiar with most of the works of the acting greats in Bollywood, Hollywood, or Tamil-Telugu cinema.
I wouldn’t have liked to have gone to boarding school, but for boys it’s different. Boys can thrive at boarding school. I assume they really love it.
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