# Memories of a British Boarding School #1

"You understand, the kids that you're competing with have been playing since they were this tall" my mum said, holding her hand down to the height of a toddler. "A Chinese kid who's been playing since he was three is a much better pianist than you are a guitarist."

I'd only been playing guitar for 2-3 years when I applied to go to music school. I'd already passed all the exams to go to all the relevant grammar schools in the North West of England, and even signed up to go to one of them. I went in one day, and played a little guitar. They also asked me to play something new that they gave me on-the-day, known as "sight-reading", and while I did a poor job, I was very good at changing and improving based on feedback on the room. The Head of Music, the Head of the Strings department, and the sole Classical Guitar teachers spoke kindly and were enthusiastic toward me (an earnest boy of 10). In the mail a few weeks later, which my mum opened with us sat on her bed, was an acceptance letter.

I was a large fan of Harry Potter as a child. When I was 10 I lined up at midnight at the Borders Books to buy my copy of the seventh book, which I sat home reading 'til sunrise, eating sherbert lemons. I loved J.K. Rowling's magical world, set inside the boarding school of Hogwarts. On my mum's bed, she gave me the decision about what to do. I thought of Harry Potter at boarding school, and immediately said I'd rather go to the boarding school. (After I pulled out of the grammar school, the fuckers still charged my mum £2,000 for the first term's fees, no small amount for a single mother.)

Making Friends
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Before the year started, they gave me a ~2.5 day trial period. I don't remember why, but I recall being in class at the school during a period where I wasn't really a student. I overlapped with a friend of mine who I'll call "Harry". Harry was also on trial. The music school was tiny! With kids from the age of 9 to 18, it still had fewer than 300 kids total. Anyway, all the kids aged 9-11 were in one class together (about 20 kids), and Harry and I were there. We messed about the whole time, and the teacher had no control over us. What could he do to us? Give us detention? We'd be gone in a day. I made Harry laugh so hard he physically fell off of his chair laughing, and teacher looked at us with fury on his large face. We quieted down for a few minutes, but Harry and I would keep making each other laugh for years and years after.

I don't really know anyone from that time, but I called with Harry for an hour around two years ago. He graduated music school and went to the academy. *He was still there*. When he told me this, I was utterly shocked that he still was in the system I'd been out of for nearly a decade. I told him he needed to get out, to grow up, to be a man. He seemed a little sheepish about the whole situation.

Cynicism
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I knew a cynic there when I was 11. He was tall, dark, mischievous, and a bit mysterious. He drank alcohol when he was 13. When I found out that he and a few friends had started drinking, I was appalled. Who did they think they were? Adults? Drinking then seemed *very* performative to me. I think it was just rebellion; I have the vague sense that he had a bad relationship with his father. I struck off drinking then, for I did not feel I was an adult. It wasn't until I was about 24 or 25 that I felt like an adult and have started drinking, an activity I feel no compunction with today (I drank two beers with a friend just before writing this).

Now that I think of it, I recall that kid laughing at with me with some of his cool cronies one time. My mother, bless her, loved me dearly, but could be taken in for various hippie and environmental rumors. She told me that certain deodorants were unhealthy and could cause cancer. In the changing room before exercise, a boy asked me why I didn't use an aerosolized deodorant, and he and the other boys laughed at me when I repeated her claim. I noticed that it was unpleasant, but they hadn't actually provided any reason for why this wasn't accurate, so I would not change my beliefs due to their pressures.

Naturally he dropped out that same year, aged 13. You couldn't be that cynical and keep going. Music school was not a place for cynics. You had to believe in something to want to get out of bed and practice your instrument for 2 hours a day (as was expected of you).

In many schools, whoever is cool is essentially determined by a popularity contest. *Not so at music school*. As subjective as art supposedly is, there was definitely signal in the noise. We all knew who the best violinist was, and he got to lead the orchestra. He got to stand in front of ~100 of his fellow students, who played in groups, and he got to play the melody alone, filled with emotion and intention. He wasn't the most fun person, but he was respected by all.

Periphery
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I was not much respected musically. First and foremost, this was because I was a guitarist, and the guitar is not an orchestral instrument. Every time the Head of Strings would announce things, we would always be forgotten. 

> "There will be a class on bowing technique on Wednesday, attendance is compulsory for the entire string department!"
> 
> "...what about the guitarists?"
> 
> "...Attendance is compulsory for all *bowed* strings."

Then the guitarists would go off at that hour into a room and make mischief, under the guise of practice. The essence of practice time is to see how much you can just be having fun with your friends instead of practicing.

And yet, even in my niche amongst the guitarist, I was not the best. I was like second or third. In a school of eight guitarists, there were somehow four in just my year, which was quite exciting. Anyway, the honor of the best guitarist went to a boy I will call "Dick". Dick was kind of on a different intellectual level than most people. He was a great musician, an emotionally mature fellow, interested in all of the arts, and secretly considered himself a little better than everyone. He could also be a bit of a depressive.

So I was in a forgotten department, and within it I was not the best. Never the cool guy in any group.

Mischief
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As I say, the goal of practice time was to *do as little practice as possible*. The school had 2 buildings, one of them dedicated to normal school classes (English, Maths, Chemistry, French, etc) and a music building filled with perhaps a hundred individual practice rooms, each with a piano (typically upright, but a number with full concert pianos) and full-length mirror, so you could see yourself play from the outside.

The mortal enemies were the 'praccies', short for 'practice assistants'. They would prowl the corridors, looking into the room to make sure you were doing what you were supposed to be. Often during practice you'd find an excuse to leave your room—to visit the bathroom, say—and stop by your friend's room. You'd open their door to chat, and end up talking awhile. This might happen 2 or 3 times in the corridor, and soon there were a half-dozen of you all in the corridor talking. After 10 minutes of this, one of the praccies would make its patrol, and you'd all scatter like mice back to your rooms, hoping that you wouldn't be the one caught.

The typical winning move was to be practicing a duet, which meant you were allowed to have your friend in the same room as you. Then you'd be off to the races, just chatting and joking. After I ended up with my own MacBook, sometime's I'd get that out and pretend to be looking up something relevant, while surfing the web. The best case scenario was that, from one or two rooms, they couldn't fully see the room from the door, *and you could lock the door*. Then you could take a girl back to the back of the room and nobody would know.

As I say, there were four of us guitarists in my year. You may not have realized, but this meant we were in a quartet, which gave us an excuse to all be in a practice room *together*. Now *that* was chaos. It was an odd group. I was friends with them all. The two girls often didn't like Dick and his sense of superiority. The girls also would go through periods of being friends and not being friends, they were not naturally quite similar. One girl always had one foot in the adult world somehow, with some real-life difficulty that she had to manage. The other girl didn't have the same issues, yet liked to complain as her default method of social interaction. They came from different social classes I guess.

I rarely fit in. I'd had many individual friends (inside and outside of the guitarists), but not friend groups. The guitarists were not a friend group by choice, but by circumstance.

* * *

*To be continued...*