One of the principal functions of boarding schools is to serve as social climbing frames for their managerial staff, who tend to come from lower middle class backgrounds and strive after social recognition by means of a specific version of proxy narcissism through association with the wealthy and powerful. Oddly, the latter are often oblivious to this crucial social function of boarding schools, as they tend to be oblivious to so much else. Obliviousness is indeed the shared mechanism by which this mysterious transfer of status appears to occur. The ability to be oblivious is arguably the most important prerequisite for success in a boarding school career.
There are exceptions to these managerial social climbers at boarding schools. For example hard drinking Bursars of the retired army officer variety, who by virtue of their upper middle class or even higher pedigrees have nothing further to prove in terms of social advancement. They are basically doing little more than treading water to top up already generous army pensions until they can retire. If they have awful wives, these years can be usefully filled with such harmless pursuits as extramarital affairs with secretaries and Domestic Bursars and pulling pension plans out of the hat to make it look as if they are actually doing something useful. Not surprisingly, the tooth and claw power struggles going on around them either provide them with mild amusement, or leave them stone cold. Either way, they are perceived by most of the boarding school community around them as being snobbish and aloof, when what they usually think they are being is discreet and professional. Either way, their role forms a third variation on the theme of obliviousness.
Irritatingly for the climbers, however, social advancement by proxy is only possible because of the distasteful domestic realities of boarding itself, and thus also of the boarding staff who do the actual work. The climbers who are so busy trying to prove that they are so much more than menial thus find themselves in the irksome position of being dependent on menial labour for their own advancement. Within most boarding school cultures, therefore, these incarnations of necessary social evil thus fulfill the important secondary role of giving everybody else in the school someone to look down on and, whenever necessary, to blame when anything goes wrong.
This built in ambivalence is not without its pitfalls, however, since a school's boarding staff are simultaneously not only its workhorse and scapegoat, but also unquestionably its backbone. In practice the only way one can maintain a sustained view of one's own backbone, institutionally speaking, is by keeping one's head very close to, if not actually inside, the nearest available orifice. This is not only a most uncomfortable position for everyone concerned, but also has disadvantage of seriously limiting one's perspective. Many of the absurdities of boarding life can be explained by this inherent conflict between pragmatic necessity and social aspiration (one hesitates to say pretension). It will readily be seen that upholding a permanent state of collective denial is sometimes the most exhausting aspect of all in this already exhausting profession.
To this fraught social ambivalence must be added the sober reality that boarding schools, by virtue of their submarine like nature, are magnets for people with various personality impairments, particularly of a kind which make it difficult for them to relate to others on an equal, one to one basis. This leads one to a sense of being surrounded by colleagues with a penchant for being permanently and irrefutably right that is all too rarely balanced by a gift for listening to what anyone else has to say. With a growing sense of dread and dismay, the realization slowly dawns that those who do best in boarding in the long term would long ago have been withdrawn from circulation in almost any other walk of life on the grounds that they were a health hazard.
Ordinarily, one could at least console oneself with the thought of being able to get into one's car at five o' clock and drive home to something resembling the real world. However, given that it is in the nature of boarding to live and work with the same people, it does not take long to become infected with a pervasive sense of mild derangement, from which some unfortunately never recover and others succumb to entirely without ever realizing that there was an alternative. Daily life in boarding frequently takes on the characteristics of a guerrilla war between the merely stressed and the manifestly deranged. The principal weapons in this warfare are backstabbing and mind jobs on the side of the manifestly deranged, which can on occasion even lead to full blown coups d'etat, and various forms of civil disobedience, mostly harmless and often humorous, on the side of the merely stressed. Needless to say, the higher up the food chain one goes, the nastier it all gets.
… Eva was looking tired and drawn, but laughing in that way that people do whose laughter muscles are not getting enough exercise and can't seem to find their rightful pathways in the face. She laughed furtively, apologetically, as if her laughter were an escaped prisoner expecting to be recaptured at any moment. Not knowing what else to do, I planted a kiss on her brow as I refilled her cup. This gesture took her by surprise, as I caught her upward glance at me standing over her. She looked just as she had done as a little girl. On an impulse, I stroked her hair, which was still damp from the drizzle outside. I was aware that my attempts to repair the damage caused by my reticence and distance all those years ago may well be making her present pain all the more acute by contrast. Was I just confusing her with my comforting gestures, which she had taught herself not to expect? She didn't need to tell me that the atmosphere at Ransom's was getting more tense and poisonous with each passing week. That much I could read in her face. "Have another piece of Dundee cake," I said.
"You see Mum," she was saying, "I was on evening duty yesterday, you know Wednesday is Carol's day off, but she was there in the office with Jane Trowbridge, the Housemistress, and Leanne the other cleaner."
"Madge wasn't there then?" I verified.
"No, that was the point!" answered Eva. "Actually Leanne wouldn't normally have been there at that hour either, of course, she finishes at lunchtime. She just came round on her way to bingo."
"The thing is," Eva went on, "Madge has been number one cleaner at Martyrs' Complex for so long that she thinks she owns the place. She's been at the school far longer than anyone else, even longer than Father Barnes, the Chaplain.
"Nice man, I like him," I said.
"Yes, he is" said Eva, looking up and smiling in agreement. "But it's a running joke at Ransom's, that everyone who goes to work in Martyr's Complex, including Jane, she's now in her third year as Housemistress you know, everyone becomes one of "Madge's Martyrs". She terrorizes the place with her moods and passing judgement on everything, and poor Leanne doesn't know whether she is coming or going half the time. Madge treats her like dirt.
"Jane and Carol and me were worried about Leanne, because we really like her and we can see that she is suffering, she goes round in tears some days, and the girls in the house really like her too and she really cares about them. Leanne always comes to tell one of us if she notices that one of the girls is being given the cold shoulder or not eating properly. She has her ear to the ground and that really helps us if one of the girls needs a chat or a bit of TLC.
"And then there are Madge's awful sulks if we try to tell her anything. She clatters that blasted bucket of hers about and she won't speak to us for days. Or she'll lock the toilet paper away in that cupboard that only she has the key to, and then when we go to her to ask for it she'll really spin it out and be awkward about it. Carol and I got so fed up we went to Tesco's in her car one day and bought a whole load of toilet paper out of our own money and put it on top of the wardrobe in her flat so that we would have some to give the girls when they asked for it. It was so embarrassing!"
Eva paused to take a sip of hot tea and a bite of cake.
"So our friend Madge is on quite a power trip then," I added.
"You can say that again! But we found out quite by accident that that wasn't the worst of it!"
"She was the Head's spy?" I volunteered blandly.
Eva nearly dropped her cup, her eyes shooting over towards me in astonishment. "Now how on earth could you know that? I didn't know it myself until a couple of days ago!"
"Well it really isn't hard to guess dear," I answered, scooping some cake crumbs off the trolley and depositing them on my used plate. "Knowing what we do about our dear Barbara, and how paranoid she is, you don't need to be a mind reader to work out that she would have some kind of network of informants. And who better," I added, folding up my napkin, "than a nasty bit of work like Madge who has been at the school forever and knows the place inside out?"
"But why on earth spy on us at Martyrs?" exclaimed Eva. "She positively despises everything to do with boarding! What on earth could interest her about our goings on?"
"I don't think you would describe our dear Barbara Head Fuque," I went on, as my daughter spluttered some tea over her skirt, "as the most empathic person on earth?"
"Hardly!" muttered Eva, wiping her skirt with a fresh paper napkin bearing a William Morris Preraphaelite design to match my blue china. "Nice napkins, Mum!" she muttered through another mouthful of cake, raising her folded napkin aloft.
"Well then," I went on, retracing the thought process step by step in my mind, trying to put myself in the position of Barbara "Head Fuque" Styles, "it would seem logical to assume that she would compensate for this lack of empathic insight by procuring more concrete forms of information into the day to day workings of her school." I paused, rethreading a piece of terracotta coloured yarn and attaching it with my curved tapestry needle to the underside of a canvas I was repairing.
"Also," I added matter of factly, "she enjoys having power over people, and knowledge, so they tell me, is power."
"It seems that Madge has been listening at all the keyholes in her orbit and passing it all on to Barbara Styles," sighed Eva.
"Eavesdroppers hear no good of themselves though, dear," I volunteered tritely, but convinced it was true.
"We just feel so powerless!" exclaimed Eva.
"Well of course you do. That is exactly what you are intended to feel."
Eva looked, rather than uttered, the question she wanted to ask, before rolling her eyes with that "Oh, all right mother, cast us your pearls of wisdom before we all die of suspense" look, grinning from ear to ear, which made a very pleasant change from the look she had been wearing on her way in.
"I thought you all did a smattering of psychology in teacher training, sweetheart?" I replied with a querying raised eyebrow.
"Yes, of course," said Eva.
"Well then, you will surely have done something about narcissism? You know, personality disorders?"
"Are you saying Barbara Styles has a narcissistic personality?" Eva asked.
"Oh, I think I am saying rather more than that, dear. From where I am sitting, narcissism seems to have become the prevailing management style, and not just in schools." I tied up the loose terracotta end and swivelled the tapestry frame round to look at my work.
"I'm not sure I see what you are getting at," said Eva.
"Well, you may remember from your psychology reading that the narcissist, having little or no access to their own true feelings, which are suppressed, is unable to "read" other people's emotions. In other words, they have very poor empathy skills?"
"Yes, that would fit," said Eva.
"But they also have an unconscious need to manipulate others into acting out their own unacknowledged feelings, especially the underlying feeling of powerlessness that led them to become narcissistic in the first place?" I looked up. "So…"
"So you are saying that we are being manipulated into feeling her powerlessness?" Eva had picked up the thread.
"That's right. Think about what you are all feeling at this moment."
"Impotent rage would sum it up!" said Eva, looking reflectively into the fireplace.
"And are you normally given to fits of impotent rage? Outside school, I mean?" I asked.
"No, not at all!" Eva replied.
I picked up another, darker piece of yarn and threaded it through my needle, turning the work over again. The darker thread was starting to set off the flower to good effect. "That's how it seems to work," I said. "It all seems to hinge on inducing a state of emotional exhaustion in you, resulting from living out emotions that are not actually your own."
"There must be more to it than that," said Eva, now in tune with the line of thought.
"Oh yes, indeed there is," I answered. "Have you noticed lately how you and Jane and Carol and Leanne seem to be living out your whole working lives in a series of knee jerk reactions to whatever little manipulative scheme is being worked out at the time?"
"Yes," answered Eva slowly, gazing into the fire, as the reality dawned.
"So that," I said, working the next couple of stitches, "is where the narcissist gets their energy, from conning you into abandoning your own agendas, whatever they may be, and having your energy sapped by all those little mind games."
There was silence for many seconds, as this perspective was absorbed. I continued stitching my leaf quietly, waiting.
"The question though," said Eva thoughtfully, "is, what can we do about it?"
"Ah," I said, reaching the end of a row of stitches, pulling the yarn through the back of the canvas. "Do you think something needs to be done then?"
"What do you mean?" Eva asked, looking a little perplexed.
"Well, I know I'm just an old woman who……"
Eva didn't even let me finish my sentence before she burst out laughing. There was a naughty glint in her eye. "Now Mum," she said, "you know perfectly well that's what you always say just before you drop one of your bombshells!"
"One of my bombshells, dear?" I repeated, reaching for the scissors and cutting off a piece of yarn at the back of the canvas.
"Come on Mum," said Eva. "Let's have it then!"
"Let's have what dear?"
"The words of wisdom, of course!"
I couldn't help savouring the brief pause as I plucked a piece of moss green yarn out of the basket.
"Well….." I started.
"Yes?" there was real amusement in her voice now.
"Well you know, there are times when the best thing you can do is nothing."
"As in absolutely nothing?" Eva pressed.
"Well the point with these narcissists, if I am right about her, that is,"
"Which we should not doubt," said Eva, grinning.
"…. is that the more you respond to them, the more energy you feed them with. They are rather like vampires, you see dear."
"Figures," said Eva, teeth sunk into a digestive biscuit.
"So arguably the best thing would be to cut off the supply of attention?" I volunteered, stabbing my needle into the outline of a leaf.
"That could take more self-discipline than I think I have," said Eva thoughtfully.
"Oh I think you could find yourself rather enjoying it, when you start to get a response," I answered.
"A response?"
"Yes. Think of it as a kind of addiction, dear. Your negative emotions are Dr. Head Fuque's "fix", so to speak. So what do you think will happen when you cut off the supply?"
"Er, she will get withdrawal symptoms?"
"I'm sure she will dear. And people with withdrawal symptoms get….." I waited.
"Desperate?" Eva responded.
"Yes, and careless."
"Mmmm. Like sort of forcing an error in tennis, you mean?"
"Exactly, dear."
"So if I understand this right, you're saying that the less we respond to this provocation from Madge and the Barb, the more likely they are to make a mistake that they can't recover from?"
"More or less, yes." I smoothed the canvas, ready for the next stitch.
"So paradoxically, the best thing we can do now is nothing?" Eva mused.
"Exactly dear."
"Right!" She sighed.
Eva stood up, looking around her. She made to collect her things together and go. I sighed contentedly and reached for more yarn. I do enjoy tapestries.
"Unless, dear, you wanted to kill two birds with one stone, and deal with Madge, and possibly one or two other irritating people as well?"
Eva appeared to think better of leaving and sat back down again.
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