I went to a boys-only ‘Direct Grant Grammar School’, part-boarding (I was a ‘day boy’), which desperately wanted to be regarded as a ‘Public’ (private, independent) school, and decked itself out with all the supposed appurtenances of that status in order to foster this impression.

So: we had ‘masters’ rather than teachers, all wearing gowns; corporal punishment; ‘praeposters’ in place of prefects (some of whom were allowed to beat junior boys); sadistic PE teachers; school on Saturday mornings; ‘houses’ (like in Harry Potter); an impressive and complicated coat of arms; a dodgy foundation date, giving us 400 years of semi-fake ‘history’; a Public school-type motto (‘Virtue, Learning, Manners’); a rather good school song; a uniform that included the wearing of ‘boaters’ (flat straw hats) in the summer; a compulsory Cadet Force; emphasis on the (ancient Greek and Latin) Classics; a Gothicky school chapel; huge emphasis on getting boys into Oxbridge, if possible to ‘read’ Classics – other universities and subjects were considered infra dig; a visit from the Queen one year (I had to be in her ‘guard of honour’, dressed in army cadet uniform, creases ironed so you could cut a finger on them); a flourishing Old Boys’ Society (without me); and a general prejudice against ‘townees’, or the local lads, who used to mock us in our blazers and boaters.

But none of this seemed to work. We always felt inferior to the ‘genuine’ Public School products, whose lives and exploits we greatly envied, as they were presented to us in the ‘Billy Bunter’ and similar juvenile stories. I would have willingly endured all the beatings and cruelties to be at Eton, Harrow or the fictional ‘Greyfriars’. But I probably should be grateful to my school. I had some good and inspirational teachers there, who managed to get me into Cambridge. The local ‘maintained’ schools were not half as ‘successful’.

Mine is now a fully Independent school, only taking fee-payers plus a few ‘scholarship boys’ (and girls, I believe); but it doesn’t yet seem to have acquired the cachet it so desperately craved in my day. One thing in particular was missing: a good sex scandal – gay goings-on in the dorms, or kiddy-fiddling masters. The first undoubtedly went on – although as a day-boy I was mercifully and naively ignorant of it. Whenever it came to light the perpetrators were expelled for ‘bullying’. How was I – safely snuggled up innocently in bed at home – to know what that really meant?

The second missing part has only come to light recently. A former music master has been arrested by the police for (and I quote) ‘Indecent Assault, Making Indecent Photographs of Children, and Observing a Person Doing a Private Act‘, during the forty years he was teaching and choir-mastering at the school. His trial comes up next month.

Cheap, I know; but this may be just what my school needs to push it up into the élite ranks. It’s one of the things the great Public Schools are known for. Not them alone, of course, and not it alone; but it goes on a lot in these institutions, for obvious reasons: adolescent boys sleeping together in dormitories, paedophile masters with huge power over them. Most of it is hushed up, as was clearly the case in my school for several years. Which is yet another reason, of course, although not the main one, for abolishing the whole institution; and not just its tax-exempt status.

Of course things may be better now…