At first sight this looks like a book about boarding schools. And, in part, it is - but only in part. Within a couple of chapters, Nick Duffell has taken the focus of the book far deeper into the British psyche and the roots of our world-famous "British reserve". Duffell argues that there is an area of knowledge and confidence about family relationships which has become effectively lost to British society and whose lack affects crucial phases of the development of its children; that archetypally British reserve, he claims, is not in fact a healthy self-restraint, but a symptom of this lack of trust in our own abilities, and creates a very specific and self-perpetuating attitude to childhood and children.
No. I think you should read it because you'll learn something about somebody you know, possibly yourself. My interest in this book was piqued by certain aspects of my relationship with my partner, who attended a very well-known public school; and yet I found so much in it that was deeply resonant about my whole family as well as about my own life that I can only recommend reading it to find out what you'll learn yourself. What impresses me most about this book is that it's supposed to be about the development of children, but it managed to clarify several totally unrelated things to me: why I've chosen non-monogamy as a lifestyle, for example, and just what it is that always makes me feel I don't fit in in social groups.
I'm hardly an archetypal public-school boy either. I'm a girl, for starters. Granted, I've got the Oxbridge education and the staunchly middle-class family; but I'm also a lifelong original thinker, bisexual, polyamorous, pagan and in general fond of exploring alternatives to the Traditional Way Of Things. I went into reading this book thinking that it would be completely irrelevant to myself, but was absolutely stunned by the number of things reading it has brought me to understand.
And indeed most of the people I know aren't archetypal public-school boys either. The "boarding-school survivors" Duffell quotes throughout the book are examples of an archetype which will be instantly recognisable to almost all Britons; the mannered, reserved, well-educated English "gentleman", whose coolly competent exterior conceals a chaos of repressed emotions and an often unhappy and childlike inner self. This, in my personal opinion, is a type which is gradually dying out as the British slowly come to terms with the information age and the concept of emotional communication; but at 25 years of age I am the child of a generation who were deeply steeped in the attitudes and culture which created this archetype, and I see elements of the attitudes and habits the book describes almost everywhere, from my parents and friends to my partners and my own upbringing. The entire book is a fascinating insight into my roots and how they have affected me, and I thoroughly recommend it to anyone with so much as a pinch of curiosity about the same.
ISBN: 0-9537904-0-1. Available online from Heffers.