Going to Seed: Where It All Began

At a young age, Simon Fairlie rejected the rat race and embarked on a new trip to find his own path. He dropped out of Cambridge University to hitchhike to Istanbul and bicycle through India. He established a commune in France, was arrested multiple times for squatting and civil disobedience, and became a leading figure in protests against the British government’s road-building programs of the 1980s and—later—in legislative battles to help people secure access to land for low impact, sustainable living.

The following is an excerpt from Going to Seed by Simon Fairlie. It has been adapted for the web.

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By the time I was eight I had lived in ten homes and been to six schools, plus a period of ‘home schooling’. This seemed normal, and not the least bit upsetting: I was astonished to be told that some kids never moved house at all. I had got pretty good at adapting to new schools, but this didn’t prepare me for what was to follow.

As far as I can gather there was an arrangement between my parents that my father would have the final word about the education of his son, and my mother about her daughters. This meant that at the age of eight, against my mother’s better judgment, I was sent to a ‘preparatory’ boarding school, whereas my sisters went to local day schools.

Boarding schools are gregarious. In the 1950s, Seaford, a small town on the South coast between Brighton and East- bourne, was to boarding schools what Hay-on-Wye is to bookshops today. There were about eight boys’ prep schools, plus a couple for girls, each with about one hundred pupils. You could see all of them in their institutional finery on Sunday mornings, when crocodile lines of uniformed children would converge on St Peter’s church, where the vicar led a special school service, for which he was rewarded with a heap of bags full of threepenny bits in the collection tray.

The purpose of these prep schools was to ‘prepare’ their charges for public school, then Oxbridge (ideally) and a career in the upper strata of British society. This involved endowing them with a classical education and instilling them with moral fibre, through a regime founded on discipline and privation.

Not that St Wilfrid’s, my school, could rival the levels of brutality that George Orwell suffered in his pre-war prep school in Eastbourne. Corporal punishment was meted out with a measure of moderation, and little evident sadism: I held the respected position of most caned boy in the school in my last year, with just eleven beatings to my credit, though the previous incumbent had received more than thirty.

Instead, life at St Wilfrid’s was characterised by relentless regimentation of a kind one might have expected at a borstal – the prisons I have since stayed in have all had regimes more relaxed than that of my boarding school. Everything, from the moment you woke up in the dormitory in the morning, to the moment lights went out in the evening was structured and monitored.

Everything had to be inspected and ‘passed’. Matron passed your back to see you had properly entered the cold shower, and then again to ensure that you had dried it; you bared your teeth before her and showed both sides of your hands to prove that they were clean; the dormitory monitor passed the bottom sheet of your bed as you made it, then the bed-making in its entirety, the brushing of your hair and the knotting of your tie.

At breakfast, masters sat at the end of each table, checking that you ate the food you were given. Then, during an institution called ‘morning prep’, the register was read out while pupils performed what might have been called homework were there a home to go to. When your name was read out you were given a ‘ticket’, a metal number from one to ten screwed to a piece of wood the size of a cigarette box.

This was the number of the toilet where you were supposed to go and defecate. If you didn’t want to perform, you had to pretend to, because the master-on-duty would be prowling around checking that every boy was doing his duty. So ingrained was this institution that the school euphemism for taking a shit was ‘having a ticket’.

And so it went on throughout the day, everything timed to the minute, inspected and passed: assembly and morning service, drill, lessons, washing for lunch, finishing your food, changing for sport or Scouts, then washing and changing back again, more lessons, tea, evening prep, more washing and bathing, till lights out. And so it continued for twelve interminable weeks at a time.

Deviation from the prescribed routine was regarded as insubordination, if not rebellion. You could run, but only at allocated times in allocated spaces – i.e. at sports and drill; not down the corridors. If you learnt the piano you had to start with ‘Dancing Round the Maypole’ and graduate to ‘Für Elise’; attempting to play pop songs or experimenting with boogie-woogie riffs would earn you a minus mark.

The only comics allowed were the wholesome Hulton Press publications Eagle and Swift, and a dreary black and white throwback to the Edwardian era called Arthur Mee’s Children’s Newspaper. Sweets were rationed to four a day, while money was strictly forbidden, and not much use anyway, since the only time you were allowed out was on the detested crocodile-formation walks.

Sweets were therefore the currency of the school’s black economy, and could buy illicit comics, protective friendship, or a bet on a horse in the ‘sweet- stake’ on Derby Day. The ration of four sweets a day was doled out by ‘sweet monitors’, senior boys whose coveted position provided ample scope for bribery and corruption.

There was some relief from this on the three weekends in the middle of a term when your parents were allowed to visit and take you out for the afternoon. And of course there were the holidays. The difficulty here was meeting other kids, since for most children the main conduit for meeting friends is their day school. As for girls, I didn’t meet any. Aside from my younger sisters, my world until the age of thirteen was a girl-free environment, not a great help in the years to come.

The other welcome form of escape was to fall ill and be consigned to the sickroom, a couple of small dormitories in the attic where none of the normal rules applied. Here, there were no lessons, no sports, no pressure to finish your meal, no cold showers, or regimented ablutions and defecations.

Instead there was a radio and a huge pile of Beano, Dandy, Beezer and Topper comic annuals; even a few of the highly prized War Picture Library. And here, Matron revealed herself to be quite a nice person. It didn’t matter how ill you felt, it was better than being at school.

But the best thing of all about the sickroom, was that you met boys of a different age. An intrinsic failing of many school systems is that they stream pupils according to age, so they rarely get the chance to socialise with older or younger kids (especially at a boarding school). In environments or countries where school is less dominant you find children of all ages running around together. The younger kids learn from the older ones, and the older kids look after the younger ones.

The sickroom was my only opportunity to socialise with older boys, who down below wouldn’t be seen dead by their peers talking to a squirt like me, unless it was to exercise prefectorial authority. Here I learnt about crystal radios, and Airfix kits, and why Elvis Presley was cooler than Tommy Steele. Here I played ‘Dare, Love, Kiss or Promise’ for the first time.

And here, if anywhere, was where I learnt the facts of life. It was, after all, in the sickroom during my first term at the school, that Susan, the freckled sixteen-year-old from town who worked as one of the maids, was discovered committing some unspeakable act with one of the older boys, and summarily dismissed. After that, the school employed only dumpy middle-aged Spanish women – and all further capers, of which there were many, were homosexual and tacitly tolerated by the housemaster.

Because of the paradise in the attic, I spent a lot of my time and energy trying to be ill, and got quite good at it. Never a term went by when I did not enjoy some time in the sickroom. I may even have benefited from it, as I now appear to have a strong immune system. But at the time it never occurred to me that there might be something perverse about an upbringing that made me want to be ill.

To maintain sanity in this somewhat grim world you needed something upon which to ground your self-respect. It might be academic achievement, or prowess at sports, or popularity with your mates. It might be something less publicly acknowledged, such as an ability to draw, or an interest in the workings of model steam engines.

But if you didn’t have anything like that and were at a loss, there was no family to support you. There were boys who had been dumped there by parents living on the other side of the world and who saw them perhaps once a year.

There were boys of eight or nine who were so disturbed they wet their bed at night – not a clever thing to do in a dormitory full of your peers. There were boys who were bullied and in the absence of parents had no one to turn to.

At one point there was a sudden spate of boys running away – three in one term. None of them came back. After the third escapee, the headmaster delivered the school a sermon on the matter in the school chapel, emphasising what a cowardly thing it is to run away. ‘And I must warn you all,’ he proclaimed in conclusion, ‘that any boy attempting to run away will be immediately expelled.’

The absurdity of invoking expulsion as a deterrent was not lost on us, and we knew that the real cowards were those who did not have the guts to run away.

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