{"id":295,"date":"2017-01-19T11:42:48","date_gmt":"2017-01-19T11:42:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/?p=295"},"modified":"2017-01-20T10:19:19","modified_gmt":"2017-01-20T10:19:19","slug":"queer-as-a-coot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/?p=295","title":{"rendered":"Queer as a coot"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cQueer as a coot\u201d \u2013 changing attitudes to sex in English boarding schools<\/strong><\/p>\n

As the comparatively innocent ten year old son of Christian missionaries, I found myself sent in 1956 to an all male boarding school in Sussex. \u00a0I had to share, for instance, a long dorm and its malodorous \u201clav ends\u201d with 25 other male adolescents. (I remember the surprise in that dorm when I knelt down to pray beside my bed on my first night there – an act of Tom Brown-like foolhardiness never repeated.) \u00a0I think that, in such a tough atmosphere I must missed my mother and sisters dreadfully because I spent all the free time I could in the Art School under the motherly wing of the only female teacher on the staff \u2013 the wonderful Miss Nell Todd with her everchanging hair colour and boundless sense of fun and creative possibilities.\u00a0 Incredibly she had been allowed to import a corner of bohemianism into that otherwise over-regulated male dominated atmosphere.\u00a0 All the other teachers were men. \u00a0Many were post-war survivors looking, I now suspect, for a settled non-traumatic civilian life. \u00a0Some of them were undoubtedly gay,- or \u201cqueer\u201d as we nastily used to call it. Most kept their predilections discreetly under cover but if they ever allowed them to show became subject to a barrage of self-righteous persecution. \u201cCome over to the chapel\u00a0 and I\u2019ll show you how to play on the organ\u201d<\/em> one music teacher, who rapidly disappeared from our lives, was supposed to have joked.\u00a0 In truth I think that, in an atmosphe re that was all too typical of English \u201cpublic\u201d schools at the time, our feelings towards sex were totally confused.\u00a0 The approved attitude was a kind of exaggeratedly hearty cheering on of anything heterosexual.\u00a0 I remember the semi-pornographic \u201cForever Amber\u201d<\/em> being read to us as a bedtime story by one of our more macho monitors.\u00a0 Further unreliable information came to us from \u201cdirty\u201d jokes. We encouraged each other to leer lustfully at the poor young Italian maids who worked in the kitchen.\u00a0 My friend Harris (even best friends were known to each other only by surname) even claimed to have a real girl friend at home in the holidays. For a short while, the school employed a pioneer Health Instructor, one Doctor Matthews, to give us basic Sex Education, perhaps to \u201cput us straight\u201d.\u00a0 Friend Harris and I were thrown out of the first lecture having a hysterical fit of the giggles at the sight of the Doc\u2019s first slide\u00a0 \u2013 a full frontal female.\u00a0 (Years later we again got into trouble for letting down the tyres of a coach which had brought a local girls school to have \u2018mixed\u2019 dancing lessons with us). But, despite such hetero cockiness, the feelings and tensions in those boarding houses were predominantly homosexual.\u00a0 Much of it remained repressed, or \u201cplatonic\u201d as we learned to call it, – crushes on girl-faced trebles in the choir or hero worship of older boys. But some of our proto-homosexuality, to judge by noises overheard in the dorm, was active too.\u00a0 I remember going for a run and coming across two \u201cqueers\u201d lying naked and loosely entwined on a rug in an unfrequented part of the wood; the picture remains flashed on my (shocked?) mind as an image of beauty and tenderness.\u00a0 Confused and repressed attitudes towards Sex were perhaps general to the British post-war populace of the Fifties. \u00a0I associate the many scandals of the time, Profumo and Vassal and the Beaulieu scouting scandal and many others, with grubby microdot pictures in those News Chronicle newspapers which we were allowed to pore over\u00a0 (and paw over) spread out on our dayroom tables.<\/p>\n

Skip on some 40 years. Towards the end of my teaching career I found myself living in a State boarding school in Norfolk which had a totally different sexual “vibe” from my earlier experience of boarding.\u00a0 For a start it was co-educational.\u00a0 The boarding houses\u00a0 had been designed in the 1960s to accommodate girls and boys in separate houses but by the time\u00a0I arrived the houses were all\u00a0co-ed, – boys’ and girls’ dorms on separate sides of the \u201chouse\u201d but sharing most of the dayrooms,\u00a0classrooms and other daytime facilities.\u00a0 I was told that this “mixing” had made an immediate difference to the pleasantness of the place.\u00a0 There was less bullying and bitching and posturing; a softer, kinder atmosphere prevailed. \u00a0 Some of the older girls, for instance, were\u00a0good at befriending and looking after the younger ones. Also the fact of being in constant face to face contact with the opposite sex, being on dining tables with each other, for instance, seemed to take some of the sting and steaminess and silliness out of their dealings, making for a more rounded and realistic appreciation of the “opposite” sex.\u00a0 \u00a0(I was delighted to find on a recent visit to my old school that similar co-educational arrangements had long ago been\u00a0made there too, as in alot of once “single sex” establishments).\u00a0 The\u00a0more relaxed atmosphere of\u00a0my \u00a0Norfolk co-ed boarding school toward \u201cmixed sexes” seemed to make for a more relaxed attitude toward sexual differences in general.\u00a0 Some of the most gifted and sympathetic\u00a0teachers on that staff were known to be gay, one even living with his partner on site.\u00a0 Staff and students alike seemed to enjoy the company and contribution\u00a0of those (few) brave young students who seemed to be working out their sexual identities\u00a0as gay or lesbian.\u00a0 They were neither feared nor persecuted. \u00a0Indeed they seemed at that school (as in the best of modern society?) to be appreciated as contributing with disproportionate generosity to the fun and culture of the community as a whole. Nor were heterosexual couples on the staff necessarily expected to be conventionally married.\u00a0 Vicky and I had spent an uncomfortable year in the 1970s dreading being found, while we occupied one of the staff houses, to be “living in sin”; but in that Norfolk boarding school several teaching couples were openly “living together” – as the accepted custom now increasingly is.<\/p>\n

I \u00a0tend to think that being at boarding school is always a less satisfactory preparation for \u00a0life than being at a day school. \u00a0Our own children went to a “common or garden” local Comp, where \u00a0I trust that they benefitted from the experience of mixing with the full spectrum of future citizenry. But it is heartening to think that the children who do have to go to boarding school – \u00a0for some it is a necessary substitute for unsatisfactory home relationships – can nowadays enjoy \u00a0a more “open”, less confusedly judgemental experience.<\/p>\n

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\u201cQueer as a coot\u201d \u2013 changing attitudes to sex in English boarding schools As the comparatively innocent ten year old son of Christian missionaries, I found myself sent in 1956 to an all male boarding school in Sussex. \u00a0I had to share, for instance, a long dorm and its malodorous \u201clav ends\u201d with 25 other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-295","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=295"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":315,"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295\/revisions\/315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}