32. And so...

Audrey’s leaves Oakdene. She’s at Westonbirt in the Cotswolds now. It’s a much posher school than Oakdene. It's right opposite Highgrove, the home of Prince Charles and next door to the arboretum. The girls are all very la-di-da and Audrey comes home saying “Okay, Yah” all the time. I don’t recognise her. But Westonbirt is not better than Oakdene by all accounts.  She hates it just like she hated Oakdene. She won’t stay there all that long.

She’s going and live at home with Mummy and Daddy. She’ll go to the local international school and make local international friends and have a regular-ish teenage life.

Boarding school isn’t right for Audrey, it turns out. It doesn’t suit her or she’s not suited to it. One or the other, or both. She will do much better living at home, going to a regular day school.

It reminds me of when I overheard Mummy talking to her friend Doris one day when I was about eight years old.

“Smacking always worked with Sophie” she explains. “But it doesn’t work with Audrey. I have to talk to her, to explain things”. She sounds a little surprised, not very annoyed, just puzzled and a little frustrated and dismayed. It’s as if she expected smacking to be the universal solution to the problem of dealing with spirited children and it’s a little tiresome to her to have to talk to Audrey instead of hitting her. And of course it doesn't occur to her that she could maybe talk to me, instead of smacking me. Why bother when apparently smacking me works well enough and takes less effort.

I’m not rebellious enough to be brought back to live at home. I am too compliant, too adaptable, too polite. I get into trouble, but only occasionally and only by accident, never by design. I never (well almost never) provoke my teachers intentionally. I have learned to play the game reasonably skilfully. I am very good at telling people what they want to hear. When mummy and daddy ask me about school, everything is fine, always, always fine. I do a good impression of happy. I never complain, I never cry or protest when the holidays are over and it’s time to go back to school. So it’s little wonder that it never crosses their minds that school might not be right for me either. That I might not be best suited to boarding. I will see it out to the bitter end, right to my eighteenth birthday and they won’t suspect a thing.

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I sometimes wonder what it might have been like if my mother had tried talking to me and explaining, instead of always shouting and hitting. I wonder how my life might have been different if she had noticed that I too was not best suited to boarding school life. What if I had grown up at home? I would probably be dealing with a different set of unhelpful and adaptive behaviours and beliefs, but sometimes I wish I had had the opportunity.

Go to the next story: 33. San (The Sanatorium)