On guardians and boarding houses

Trevor Howard is one of my movie idols, having starred in both The Third Man and Brief Encounter, two of my favourite films of all time.

I was delighted, therefore, to chance upon an old copy of his biography, by Terence Pettigrew. And, as with all accounts of the lives of upper-class Englishmen of a certain era, there was much to fascinate readers here.

Howard’s sister, Sheila: “went to an English school which advertised quite a lot in the East, and quite a lot of the girls’ parents were based in Ceylon and southern India.” He followed her to the UK a few years later.

“Adolescence… meant being looked after by a procession of strangers doing it strictly for the money. Love never entered the equation,” the biographer explained.

There were hardly ever “displays of affection – hugs, kisses or an arm around the shoulder.” Some suffered “at the hands of so-called guardians… beatings were commonplace.”

The idea of a girl punished by her guardian must be a stock fantasy for many spankos, much as we’d abhor the actual reality. So I read on, to find that many of those shipped from abroad to boarding school: “arrived in Britain with no idea who would be meeting them.” That, in itself, sparks all sorts of dark ideas of girls spending the journey dreading who might have been assigned to look after them – or even being greeted and taken away by the wrong person entirely.

And I’d always imagined that a pupil would have a specific guardian, to whose house they would return every vacation. Not always so, it seemed:

“The college had a list of ‘suitable’ boarding houses where long-distance pupils were farmed out for the holidays, but little or no prior vetting of these establishments appears to have been done.”

My fantasy boarding house owners would look after several girls each holiday. They’d hand them a list of rules on their arrival, and would punish any breaches most severely.