The recent admission by BBC presenter Nicky Campbell that he was a victim of abuse at school in the 1970s adds to the increasingly fat catalogue of school abuse stories which includes celebrities like Richard Branson, Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift as their victims.

Not that school has ever been the idyllic place it was for some supposedly lucky pupils. Dickens with his ‘Dotheboys Hall’, Orwell and his essay ‘Such, such were the joys’, are just two examples illustrating the sad fact that British education has often been unpleasant and even brutal for so many children.

I have not noticed any similarly harsh school experiences in my reading of Italian literature. That classic book ‘Cuore’ by Edmondo De Amicis, cast in the form of a third year north Italian primary schoolboy’s diary, for example, brings out the importance of compassion and tolerance to be emphasised during this critical stage of a child’s development. I suspect there may have been tougher moments in a German kid’s education but so far there’s nothing I have come across there to beat sheer British school mistreatment of its clients.

So is it just the UK that has this spectre of cruelty haunting its educational system?

My own experiences of abuse during my elementary and secondary education are negligible but they should perhaps be mentioned.  The important point, however, is that what now passes as abuse was not considered so once but was deemed an intrinsic part of the school system.  Also abuse from other schoolchildren seems today rather more in the fore than abuse from the teaching establishment. It’s called bullying and in Italy ‘bullismo’ has truly become a very big issue.

Abuse may be sexual or physical. Actually, exploitation of sexual innocence and ‘ten of the best’ are physical abuse involving (im)pure violence. More deeply distressing is, of course the psychological damage these cruelties inflict upon the victim’s self-esteem. Nicky Campbell says it scarred him for life but at least he didn’t take that life as many other schoolkids have sadly done.

The boarding school scenario is clearly worse than the day school one. At least in the latter a child may seek escape after the rigours of the classroom within a seemingly ‘normal’ everyday life in and around the home they daily return to. But the title ‘Roman Catholic Boarding School’ is enough to inflict terror or revulsion in many of us now particularly when an ailing Pope has deemed it necessary to fly to another continent to apologize for the appalling mistreatment suffered by native children in schools run by psychotic religious ideological sadists.

In my own case at the secondary school I attended (a ‘public’ school for which I obtained an LCC scholarship) if there was any abuse it could be classified as coming from one of three sources: the teachers, the prefects and the other kids.

Regarding the teachers the school rules did allow corporal punishment in my days and I certainly did not escape the cane particularly during those volatile years of puberty when behaviour often became particularly erratic. I think the rod was applied to my bottom on a couple of occasions when aged twelve by a chapel-formed Welshman, head of the Lower School, who in all respects was a model of moral uprightness. It was, of course, the usual adage ‘it hurts me more than it hurts you’ and ‘it’s for your own good’. The punishment was administered in front of the martinet’s desk in his study and was unseen by anyone else. Indeed the thrashing was not even known about by my parents and I hid the telling marks on my posterior and the sting they produced for several hours from them. Not even a note was sent by the Lower School head to my parents to tell them of the punishment, let alone any request of permission for them to allow it to be inflicted upon their son.

The corporal punishment stage (or the physical abuse if you like) did not last much beyond my transition from childhood to young adolescent. However, this was not the end of the ‘physical’ aspect of my education. Unbelievably, the prefects (a band of sixth formers elected by the college to implement school rules among students – an institution developed in the famous Doctor Arnold’s school at Rugby) also had the right to cast the cane onto one’s bum. This occurrence happened to me once and the punishment was inflicted in the prefect’s room on the ground floor in the school’s south block and in the company of all the other prefects. Yes. It was a quite public affair among the elected ones and the procedure was preceded by a speech by the head prefect explaining the reason for the sentence which was to the effect that ‘you have disgraced the school’.

That leads me to a startling point. I can’t remember exactly why I received the cane or why I had suddenly disgraced the school. Was it for not wearing the school cap on the local railway station platform? Was it for being caught smoking a Consulate fag on the common? Was it for cutting games during a rainy Saturday afternoon? Was it for being cheeky with one of the prefects and showing them a picture of a French pin-up? Was it for being late for early report on an icy winter’s morning? Early report was usually inflicted for unsatisfactory homework or for not doing it at all. School started at nine a.m.  But, for early report given by the teachers, one had to turn up at a quarter to nine. Even worse, however, was early report given by the prefects when one had to turn up at half past eight!

Despite these unpleasant situations the tangible damage for me was psychological and one incident in particular brought this out. Indeed, I was reminded of it most sympathetically many years later when I met up with a former contemporary at an event for old boys at the school. (Yes, unlike quite a few others I did manage to return to my old school!) It was when I turned up in the second term of my third year class and was now in classical Latin and Greek stream. On entering the classroom I was suddenly told by my form master that I was no longer in this class for I had been expelled from it on the grounds of underperforming academically. I was to go, instead, to the (apparently lower) geography stream class. Shaken and clearly worried about what my parents (who had been most keen for me to become a classicist) would say I picked up my belongings and trudged to the geography class where I was greeted by a mixture of cheers, hoots and a resigned expression from my new form-master, a wonderful man nick-named Humph who, after his death I found had been a more-than-Sunday artist of some worth. Un-amazingly, my parents did not know about my class demotion until several weeks later.

Of teachers (or ‘master’s as they were called at my old school – there was not yet one female teacher on the staff) I was really only scared of one ‘beak’ who taught us English. It was my first year and ‘ook’, as he was known, summoned me from my desk to stand before him in front of our class of around thirty pupils. ‘Ook’ then began to bark at me and harangue me for my stupidity in the subject. I was underperforming.  I did not listen. I talked when I should have listened. I was a discredit to the class and to the school etc. etc. Indeed, the outbreak of this teacher upon me shocked not only me but the rest of the class as well to the extent that some boys tried to interrupt the jeremiad saying ‘Come on Sir. Don’t you think that’s enough? Let him go back to his desk.’ It was remarkable! Eleven year olds with already a modicum of moral obligation and fairness.

Years later I met up with the same master at another old boys event. (Yes I could never entirely tear myself away from the school. I think it must – although Anglican in philosophy – have learnt a thing or two about retaining its clients from the Jesuits.) At that meeting, the teacher offered an apology for his treatment of me during that fateful year one. That was probably the most valuable apology I have ever been offered by anyone in my life!

 I was luckily (outside selected teachers and prefects) not subject to any bullying at school. I think this may be because I gathered a band of really reliable friends around me some of which I keep in touch with to this day. It may also have been because the regime of compulsory games twice a week (Wed and Sat afternoons) would channel our aggressive feelings into something more organised like tackles and scrums. There was just one person who caused me a little angst, especially when we had a fight in the bike sheds (yes we cycled to school in those days) and I pushed him against his Reynolds 853 framed two wheeler buckling the front wheel. Again, I did not tell my parents about this incident but my dad, a man from the ‘Pru’, found out what had happened and saved me from forking out my pocket money to the bike-shed Bluto for the next twenty years by claiming on my insurance policy.

 So that is my little tale of abuse, exploitation and manipulation at school. But was it physical abuse or merely application of school rules regarding corporal punishment? Was it psychological abuse or just learning the facts of life and realising that cunningness usually counts for more in life than cleverness? Who knows? Certainly times change and they are now changing especially fast. Everything has become more complex. Multifaceted and heterogeneous elements enter the equation. Mind-sets mutate. Culture changes and occasionally evolves towards a better world.

Big questions still enter my mind, however. Apart from the vividness of the often traumatic episodes which have unexpectedly punctured my adolescent development. Apart from the cutting phrases which I can still remember. Apart from the wearing down of my ego by certain elders until I measured myself as being more lowly than an earthworm I consider myself lucky that I was never sexually abused for that must surely be more harsh, more life-destroying for so many people than being thrashed on one’s bottom by a prefect.

Would I have had a happier education if I had entered an Italian school as might well have been possible in my situation? Would I have avoided bullying or denigration? Would I have grown up into a more aesthetically rounded and appreciative person? Would I have been able to speak in fluent ancient Greek? Would I have avoided the trauma I had with maths? I would certainly have avoided corporal punishment as that was abolished in all Italian schools in 1928!

I have however, entered an Italian school but as a teacher, not a pupil, since becoming a resident of ‘il bel paese’ over sixteen years ago. But that is another story….