COVID LIFE AS A BOARDER

By Hamish Venters former Rugby School student and BSA Intern

Last year (2020) was a strange year in a number of ways. Perhaps for boarders, however, the strangest thing was being at home for quite so long. Having left boarding school four years ago, I am perhaps not best placed to describe the experience of a boarder during the COVID crisis.

nonetheless, I do have the benefit of three younger sisters, two of whom spent at least some of the three lockdowns learning remotely from boarding schools. So I have walked out of the last 16 months with at least some sense of what it was like to be a boarder, albeit vicariously.

There are seven of us in our family (if you include the dog, which we obviously do): my parents, my three sisters, and me. My siblings and I have all attended boarding school since the age of about nine or ten; three of us are through the other end, and the youngest enters her final year in September. It was for this reason that one of the weirdest things about lockdown was all of us staying at home together, every night, for such an extended period of time.

School holidays produced relatively similar circumstances, but then they always had an obvious end point, whereas at many times it seemed the pandemic did not. Moreover, visits to friends, holidays and the like meant that at no point had all of us spend three months under the same roof since I was about nine. This did beg the question – how would we cope with it all? Had we all unknowingly developed irritating habits? Would we drive each other mad?

I’m pleased to report that we all got along famously. It helped, of course, that we were all busy. For the first lockdown I had finals to worry about, and for the subsequent two a law conversion course. My eldest sister had a job, and the two youngest had online classes. The school worked very hard to ensure that they essentially retained a full curriculum. While I don’t think they felt entirely grateful every morning at 8:30, I’m sure they appreciate just how lucky they are. As we can all see, it was not a given that you were kept busy and intellectually engaged.

This meant that during the day, we largely left each other to our own devices, content to just get on with our new lives. My sisters had classes and even had sports programmes prepared for them. In the evenings we’d all come together for dinner, and spend an hour or two just chatting. Dad might sometimes get up from the table earl to cram in another episode of Poirot, which became his lockdown obsession. Many thanks are owed to David Suchet, who got my father through lockdown with his sanity, and little grey cells, intact.

We were also lucky that my sisters have such a brilliant housemistress, who did a great job hosting a Wednesday night quiz. This quiz had been a tradition in the house from well before the pandemic, but was now open to all the girls’ families too. In normal times, my sisters considered the quiz a casual bit of fun and an excuse to fire up the house popcorn machine.

not so for the family. Wednesday night took on an almost religious significance for us. It was often said that lockdown was a chance to stop, take a step back, and reconsider what we felt was important in our lives. Well, for my family what was important was the correct deployment of the ‘joker’ round (before a round started, you could elect to make it your ‘joker’ , in which case your score for the round would be doubled).

Honestly, the trials and tribulations of our weekly performance in the quiz would be discussed endlessly, and in detail. The rounds that we were good or bad at. The questions we should have answered correctly. The ones where mum felt aggrieved because she very tentatively suggested an answer, full of caveats about how she ‘wasn’t sure’ , only for it to be correct when we went for something else.

Dotted across our screen were families from across the country, hopefully taking it less seriously than us. Plastered on their screens would have been fist-pumps in response to a lucky guess and bowed heads in hands for a near miss or silly mistake. My youngest sister, being 17 and highly aware that her friends were watching, was obviously mortified at the whole spectacle. At one point, worried that we were doing conspicuously well, she lied about our score to make it lower. That was about as close to a falling out as the family came to.