How Different Was Your Home Life From Your CH Life?

[sejintenej]

Looking back at almost five years of this thread shows me what different backgrounds we had, what life knowledge we had to start with and what different home backgrounds.
Remember that this relates to the 1950's when we had no TV, internet or (in my case) radio and newspapers. Things are different these days
I am forced to agree totally with Kim2s' comment:

Kim2s70-77 wrote: I was completely out of my depth, although CH had given the chameleon-like skills to present an appropriate front. There was just no depth to the presentation!

I wonder whether, despite the young lady's obvious intelligence she realised that she knew nothing about life and couldn't cope:

I did know of at least one girl who came from a very much poorer background than I. But sadly she will not be contributing to this Forum. She was always very bright, achieved an Exhibition to Oxford, took a First, became a Nun, and then took her own life.

I had been effectively alone (check Mrs Bridges in Upstairs, Downstairs) in a place 13 miles from the nearest town, the three friends moved away when I was about 7 and there were no other kids around. The local language was far removed from Lunnun - only one person had been outside the immediate area and that was because he had been a stoker in WWI. Her boss put me in CH - my mother was innumerate though she could just write and could not even afford clothes or shoes for me - I was still wearing her castmedowns.

What did CH do? by the time I left I had absolutely no idea about the world outside the boundary fence, no knowledge of the economy or jobs or even how stuff got in shops (I saw then at the underground going home), no money and no real home. Apart from Oxbridge there were no places of further learning and you could only go there if you got S levels and weren't Jewish. CH might have taught me about the Pilkington Float Glass Process but not about life and relationships. Even when I left with a Bible (this was a few days before everyone else for outside reasons) I was treated by most staff and boys as if I was being expelled - not even a goodbye or good luck but they still pester me for money

[Donsimone]

A Missing Shade of Blue

I pitched up with the mark of Cain – Michael Caine actually, complete with Sarf Lundin aksehn't. In Second Form Geography, peg-legged old salt Kit Aitken would promise a pre-decimal 1d 'prize' to dipthonged Londoners for correctly pronouncing the aspirated aitch, even if I'd previously imagined a London accent to be, if not an enviable trait, at least nothing to be ashamed of.
No cause for concern, kidology ever was part of the expert teacher's bag-of-tricks, Kitology in this case. In emergencies, there was always the Quiet Room where the put-upon could retire to and think things over.

Leave Day though could be a bittersweet even bruising merry-go-round: the liberating roar in the direction of home, stopping en route on Boxhill, despite the uniform – after all, being mistaken for an AWOL member of the Vienna Boys Choir was an ever-present danger. The naughty-boy zipped cover of the Rolling Stones 'Sticky Fingers', casually tossed into the boothlike window of the sole café always caught my eye tho' I never listened to them ( too successful, too old ).
Never arriving soon enough, the polite phallic procession of Lunch Parade uncelebrated and unmissed, the easy embrace of our small kitchen more than made up for the stodgy grandeur, the poodle-anarchy of the Dining Hall. Bedboards finally exchanged for a splendid splinter of blissful reunion with the once fought-over bunkbeds, the cloudbusting intimacy of the top mattress was healing, sensual.
The afternoon purred away in clock-stopped time.

The fog of contentment rudely dissipated by the dark hull of the day's retreating freedom, dogs silently sorry to see me go, the return journey without end, moist of eye and flesh crawling low in the passenger seat, back into the sightless glare of the oncoming night traffic but never long enough before the austere silhouette of the Main Gate was re-appearing like a recurring rash. A stifled Desperate Dan sigh - my hatred of farewells undoubtedly dates from that time - and back to the old boy-bazaar and the promise of a glittering career, in truth already tarnished by a nagging dread of boarding-school, its sublime decrepitude, unencountered in my Biggles or Just William days and rarely in the long nomadic days since.

'Lord of the Flies' might have been better reading preparation for this rite of spartan maladaptedness. Next time round, at the very least, I'll have to remember to be born a Master's son.
Then maybe, who knows, love would be the law. But I'd settle for a little ubuntu.

Hey Santa, pass the Barolo, would'ya.

Happy 2015 and Arrivederci.

[Pe.A]

I came from a large council estate in London, where my head teacher told me I should go to Christ's Hospital because then my Mum wouldn't have to struggle financially with raising me. I went, and my accent was constantly made fun of until I adapted a more middle class/public school boy accent. I very much felt like I was in middle class land during term time, and then back to the streets in the holidays. It was only when I got bigger that I started dropping the public school boy accent. Since then, my accent constantly changes depending on who I am talking to.

i actually remember you having a reputation as being handy on the cobbles. You left as i joined Peele A...

[rockfreak]

It's so interesting reading back over this stuff and how varied opinions are. Considering that Christ's Hospital is supposed to be a bit different from the so-called elite fee-paying schools where you might expect to find snobbery, I can still discern gradations of social class consciousness, especially from my older baby boomer generation. I have this theory that class is so endemic in this country that we never quite get shot of it. It runs like lettering through a stick of rock. I believe that it's part responsible for this impending Brexit nonsense. Enough people have been persuaded by the Sun, Mail, Express and Telegraph either that someone down below is doing them down (immigrants), or that someone up above (the mythical liberal elite) is doing them down. It's all couched in class. Where does it come from? Is it in our much-loved nineteenth century literature which is drenched in class consciousness? The real culprits of course are the politicians like Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg who have a vested interest in keeping it going.

Holidays in my era. Michael Scuffil has posted elsewhere that he was bored in the holidays. I can understand that. I was fortunate enough that my good mate from down the road in north London always came and sought me out in the holidays so that it was a time of endless cricket and football on the local rec, precious visits to White Hart Lane (a couple of bob on the terraces then) and constant discussion of the latest pop music. I was lucky I guess. Having said that, I remember that when the Housey Special got within sight of Victoria station at the end of term you could hear the cheering right down the train. By contrast, I don't remember any cheering on the return journey. And my mother used to get quite upset at the sight of one or two of the younger boys who seemed to be unaccompanied and on the verge of tears.

[mland]

My parents decided to move during my first term at CH. It meant that I came 'home' as a stranger in a strange land. CH became home, though perhaps not an ideal one. University was an equally radical removal and I rapidly lost contact with CH friends. We simply didn't have the means of keeping contact that people have now.

[sejintenej]

My parents decided to move during my first term at CH. It meant that I came 'home' as a stranger in a strange land. CH became home, though perhaps not an ideal one. University was an equally radical removal and I rapidly lost contact with CH friends. We simply didn't have the means of keeping contact that people have now.

M y home also was moved during term time. It went from country 13 to 16 miles from anywhere about 12 hours by car, tube and train from CH to on the outskirts of a small village in leafy Sussex. I knew my way around "nowhere" and could go anywhere I liked to close on a comparative prison with nothing to do and nowhere to go. I never got to meet even one neighbour - insular so-and-soes. After I left CH I did get to meet someone from 10 miles away but with 9 years of a CH education I had no idea how I was expected to act!