I used to worry that I would never be a good writer because my childhood wasn’t interesting enough. I now think there must be some other explanation. Because the truth is that, when I was still pretty young, my parents banished me to an isolated community where for years on end I was compelled to dress in heritage costume, endure the uncanny absence of women and participate in ritualistic group activities, often of a physical or religious nature. That’s right. I am an Old Harrovian.
On the face of it, this seems like an odd choice for my parents to have made for me — although it isn’t as bat-cave crazy as Alex Renton tries to suggest in Stiff Upper Lip, his rich, righteous diatribe against the public school system. ‘This is not a book about me,’ he announces in his opening sentence, but that’s not entirely true. All books are to some degree about their authors. Before Eton, where he was wretched and rebellious, Renton attended a prep school in East Sussex, where he was sexually manhandled by one teacher and madly thrashed by the headmaster, a drink-sodden sadist. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, he’s angered by these memories. This is an angry book.
So don’t be misled by the wry title and inviting cover design, which has been got up to resemble a school blazer. This is not by any stretch of the imagination a fun read, although it is compelling and provocative. As long as you know what you’re getting, you won’t be disappointed.
Stiff Upper Lip is three things. First, it’s a baffled inquiry into why, almost uniquely, the brutish British have routinely sent their children away to boarding schools. Second, it’s an outraged history of corporal punishment in such institutions, the structural fact of it, which now strikes us as shocking, and its gross abuses.
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