Long life: Will we all be Old Etonians soon?

When I was a child there was never any doubt that I would go to a boarding school. My father, my uncle and my elder brother had all gone to Eton, and it was assumed that I would eventually go there, too; but I would first be expected to board at a preparatory school with a good record for getting its pupils into that famous establishment. And so it was that from the age of 8 to 18 I spent more than half of every year away from home, living in communities of other boys in the care not of parents but of schoolmasters. My two sisters went to boarding schools, too, just as our mother had before them, and it didn’t seem to matter whether or not we children were happy boarders; boarding school was our inevitable fate, and nobody questioned that it was the best thing for us.