A SECRET WORLD: Life inside a Victorian boarding school in 1980s Britain

A SECRET WORLD: Life inside a Victorian boarding school in 1980s Britain

A memoir of lost innocence inside a Kent boarding school trapped in another century. In 1983, a seven-year-old boy was sent to St Michael’s, a tiny High Church Anglican prep school, where the childhood he and his new friends had known was promptly guillotined. Set against the backdrop of Thatcher’s Britain racing toward modernity, life inside St Michael’s followed a Victorian rhythm: punishment runs before dawn, cold showers, early mass, lights-out silence, standing to attention outside on freezing February nights wearing only their pyjamas, and masters who ruled with canes and Bibles. The God introduced to them was not a comfort but a threat. Amid the archaic discipline, friendships became armour. The boys became brothers in arms—escaping their dormitories at night to hunt for the school ghost, breaking into the tuck shop for midnight feasts, or wandering the vast surrounding forests where they built camps in the woods, and where nature offered a gentleness denied by the adults in their isolated world. Escape also came through humour: a perpetually drunk history master who regularly fell asleep during lessons, absurdly embarrassing sports teams, and endless pranks on masters designed to avenge the relentless punishments handed out to them. But darker shadows lingered: sadistic and deviant masters, and alcohol-infused midnight ‘parties’ in their rooms that left scars lasting decades on the young boys in their care. This memoir reckons with a bygone system that mistook suffering for strength—and celebrates the resilience and brotherhood that allowed children to survive it.