My boarding school was characterised by a spartan lifestyle (little heating, a lot of outdoor exercise, frequent corporal punishment) but had a wonderful camaraderie. This was in another age. Was it abuse? By today's standards, yes, but as L.P. Hartley famously wrote "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there". I thought my memories were a bit gothic and possibly embellished until I read this in a book about the post WWII spying scandals. This was the prep school where Ian Fleming (of James Bond fame) was a pupil. So not just my school, just how it was...
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Anyone who says 'Schooldays are the happiest days of your life' is mad or has lived the most miserable of lives. However, they didn't have to be the most awful either. I have sometimes wondered what was going on in parents' heads when they wanted to lose their young children at such an early age to such spartan regimes.
