Houses

It’s funny how many parents think that the most important thing about a good Eton boarding house is the house master. Before I came to Eton my parents spent many hours discussing the relative merits of different house masters, with the intention of sending me to the one they thought would suit me best.

I can see why they did that. People prefer to have control over things that matter to them, and rather than truck me off to any old house my parents wanted to give me the best opporunity of enjoying Eton. The house master – the leader of the fifty boys under his charge – seemed to them the critical factor in this game of chance.

The reality, however, is that parents might as well pick a house out of a lucky dip bag. That’s not to say that house masters aren’t important. They are, but what matters far more is the other nine boys you end up in the house with. They are the ones who make all the difference about whether you have a good time at school, not the greying, middle-aged man trying to stop smoking on the top floor.

And this, of course, means that there’s no way of knowing whether the house you pick will be a good one, since the other nine boys are as mysterious to you before you arrive as you are to them.

I was fortunate enough to end up in a block which gets on very well with each other. None of us are particularly clever, nor sporty, but no-one takes themselves too seriously which is the most important thing.

The only outlier is Runty, whom I’ve mentioned already. Not because he’s talented in any meaningful way, but because he’s basically a knob. A judgment that I alone seem to hold.

Whenever I complain about him to the others (it’s one of my favourite subjects) I occasionally get a ‘yeah, I know what you mean mate’. More often than not though it’s a ‘come on mate, he’s not that bad really’. Err, no, he is that bad really. He’s a stupid oaf, something I realised in our first week together when he sprayed half a can of Lynx into my room as a ‘joke’.

Anyway, almost as important as your own block are the boys in the blocks above you, especially when you first enter the house.

Every September it’s a fact that the E blockers walk around with something of a swagger, a natural result of no longer being the babies of the house. They love their new found confidence, but because they’re still insecure at heart they need to express it in front of other people.

The D blockers won’t pay them any attention, so it’s the F blockers who become the primary targets.

For the most part this consists of entering F blockers' rooms without notice, speaking very loudly, proffering dubious stories – ‘you know in our second week we got smashed on vodka and climbed up College Chapel roof?’ - and generally being overwhelming.

It’s innocent usually, but at times it goes too far. When we were in F block one of the E blockers (now a B blocker) effectively bullied two of my friends in the Michaelmas term. It started off with silly jokes – hiding their Fixtures or jumping out from behind corners – but turned dark quite quickly. The worst thing I remember was him leaving one of them an anonymous note in his pigeon hole with a creepy message on it. Soon afterwards they joined forces and confronted him in his room one evening. It stopped after that.

I don’t know why people behave like this. I’ve never had a problem with him, but maybe my friends reminded him of a bully when he was younger, and he felt he was getting revenge.

It’s inevitable that in any school that there will be some bullying, but I’d say there’s less of it here than you'd expect. Sometimes a joke or banter is taken too far – I was called ‘Chunder Woman’ months after a bout of stomach bug vomiting, which became pretty tiresome – but mostly it is good natured.

Actually, if banter disappeared in the house life would become very boring. Everyone has a flaw or embarrassing incident that everyone else knows about, and if you start getting big-headed you’ll soon be slapped back down with it.

On reflection, some of these embarrassing incidents seem rather farfetched. In E block a rumour circulated that one of the C blockers had pooed himself in the shower before his Geography trial, apparently out of nervousness. I asked the Dame about it a week later, imagining she would have played a role in the clean-up operation, but she denied ever hearing about it. It’s possible she was trying to save his blushes, but before a trial? And a Geography one?

Being in a house is not like supporting a football club – there’s no tribal loyalty and no-one goes around shouting about how much better theirs is than everyone else’s. But most people, in fact nearly everyone, makes their closest friends in the house. So when my parents picked my house – be it calculated or whimsical – they probably didn’t realise the importance of their decision; the fact that they were choosing, completely blindly, the people with whom I would spend a silly amount of time for the next five years and become best friends.

So thanks pater and mater, you did a good job. Yes, you chose Runty, but I can overlook that one. Let's blame it on the house master.