Thirty years ago this month, I was packed off to boarding school. I arrived with a trunk, a tuck box with my initials on it, a set of uniform my mother had spent the best part of a month name-taping (imagine how long my name tape was) and my own maid.
Only joking. I didn’t have the last one. But rumour had it the anxious parents of another girl in my year, from the Gulf, had asked if a maid could accompany her and sleep in a nearby room. This request had been denied.
I was reminded of this while reading a recent article about the rise in wealthy Americans increasingly paying for their children to have laundry services and maids at university. One Yale student admitted that being able to understand a washing machine and do the laundry was “a basic skill that everyone should probably know”, but said that his parents didn’t know how to do it either, so how was he expected to? He’d therefore fallen back on the services of a company that would wash and press his smalls for him.
“Personal service providers to college students have exploded in the past decade,” read the piece in The Washington Post. “Laundry, dorm cleaning, meal-prep companies target elite schools [universities], where wealthy families will fork over thousands to save their child a few extra hours each week.”
To be fair, the cleaning policy at British universities varies, and if you have an en-suite bedroom at an Oxford college, you may well have a cleaner every week, whereas at others it may be a cursory vacuum of the communal corridor from time to time. To encourage cleanliness, Bristol University issues its students a 24-page document entitled “Student cleaning expectations and guidance”, which includes a list of cleaning dos and don’ts. “Never drink or digest any of the cleaning chemicals/products,” is one of these helpful tips. “If you do…, seek medical assistance immediately.” Hear that? Mind how you go on the Toilet Duck during Fresher’s Week, everyone.
I went to university in London and was never in halls. Instead, I lived with two others in a basement flat in Brixton where my bedroom carpet flooded every now and then because the macerator in the adjacent bathroom was constantly breaking, causing loo and bath water to seep under the walls and soak my room. My bed base developed a brown tidal mark depending on how bad the latest flooding had been. Good times. I developed a very close relationship with our mop and Hoover as a result. I was certainly doing my own laundry.
Might boarding-school children be better prepared for university than their day-school peers? No sniggering at the back. OK, it wasn’t Borstal, but there was a reasonably spit-spot regime at my school. From the age of 11, we made our beds every day and had to change them every week. Fortunately, we didn’t have to warm anybody’s lavatory seat, as they did at certain boys’ schools, but we also had to change older girls’ beds in a peculiar “pash” system, which I talked about in this week’s episode of The Poshcast. We learnt to do our laundry far before those who stay at home might.
Nobody suffered homesickness when they began at Edinburgh, Leeds, Newcastle or similar because they’d been through all that several years earlier. After a gap year in India, one public-school chap I knew was so determinedly self-sufficient that, when he arrived for his first year at Bristol, he demanded that the bed in his halls be removed from his room in order that he could sleep on his roll-up mat (although I believe this lasted all of two or three weeks before he asked for the bed to be put back).