Chapter 4: Boarding school
Chapter 4: Boarding school
In September 1925, I was nine years old, and it was time for me to go to boarding school. Children stay the night at boarding school and live there without their families.
St Peter’s School in Somerset was the nearest English boarding school to our house in Wales, but it was across fifteen miles of sea. This sea was called the Bristol Channel.
For school, my mother gave me a very special new box. It was called a tuck box. Every child at boarding school has a tuck box. They are always closed with a key, and no teacher can look inside them. Boys keep food, toys and other special things in them. At St Peter’s, one boy kept a frog in his tuck box!
My mother travelled to St Peter’s School with me. We went to Cardiff in a taxi and then across the water by boat. On the English side, we went in a second taxi to the school. I had a new school uniform. All my clothes were new, and everything had my name on it.
St Peter’s School was outside the town. It had beds for 150 boys and rooms for the headmaster’s family. There was a lot of grass outside for playing sport.
On the first day there were many boys and their families in front of the school. The very tall headmaster walked from group to group to meet the parents.
“Goodbye, Mrs Dahl,” he said, quickly. “It’s time to go. Don’t worry; we will look after him.”
My mother understood. She said goodbye to me and left in a taxi. The headmaster went to talk to a different family. I stood there with my new tuck box and began to cry. I was sad because I did not want to live away from my family.
Life at St Peter’s School was difficult. The teachers were not friendly, and I was always frightened of the cane. We had to wash in cold water, and the food was bad. I wanted to go home and see my family.
At night in bed, I always thought about my family and tried not to cry. They were across the Bristol Channel, and I could see the sea from my window. I always went to sleep with my face towards my family. I never turned my back towards them in bed.
Mothers sent their hungry sons food every week. This made the headmaster happy, because food was expensive.
“Send food as often as you like! Once a week. Or twice a week!” the headmaster always said. “Your boy gets good food here, but food from home is always more special. You can send them things like fruit and a big cake. You don’t want your child to be the only boy with an empty tuck box.”
Every Sunday, every boy at St Peter’s wrote to his family. We never wrote about the bad things at school. We only told our parents good things, because the headmaster read our letters.
He saw our bad spelling, but we could not change it in the letters. We had to write the words correctly later.
“No teacher has read this letter,” our parents thought, “because there is bad spelling in it. Everything in this letter must be true! My child is happy at school.”
I wrote to my mother that first Sunday, and then I wrote to her every week for thirty-two years. Sometimes more than once a week. In 1957, she died, and I found more than 600 of my letters to her. She kept them all.