Recently I have been sorting out unedited old photos from various old hard drives, and picking out the good ones. These are from 2012, of a place called Bedgebury in Kent. It’s a strange and a beautiful place which provided me with relief at a very hard time in my life. I didn’t have a computer at the time I took them, and they’ve kind of sat on the hard drive ever since, like a tooth with a hole in, due to the associations with that particular time in my life.
I urgently needed money, and I needed a job, and I needed a boost to my self-esteem. Then the summer school I had previously worked for asked me if I was free to teach on an autumn course.
Bedgebury Park is a stately home that had previously been a boarding school. The school had closed down several years before, and new buyers were finalising the sale (it now seems to be some kind of luxury holiday resort with yoga and horse riding), so the owners were renting it out for temporary courses, of which ours was to be the last one. Our students filled a small section of the building, and the rest was essentially abandoned (more of that later).
It was a relief to be teaching kids, and planning activities, and seeing them enjoy them. We went on nature walks around the grounds, and had a bonfire, and created scavenger hunts. There was a whole room full of old school play costumes they had fun with.
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A local historian came to give the students a tour of the house and tell them about the ghosts, secret doors, and sunken manor under the lake. There’s a whole Elizabethan era house at the bottom of the lake. At some point in the 1700s the owner wanted a new, up to date manor on the hill, with a fashionable lake. It turned out to be cheaper to flood the old house than to demolish it first.
When I wasn’t working, I spent a lot of time either wandering the grounds or sitting in the library. I found it hard to relax in my spare time, and the sparse dorm room I was sleeping in was beyond depressing (and I didn’t have a computer I could watch tv on), and the staff were on a rota with different times off. So I ploughed my way through a load of classic literature. I was struggling to eat or keep food down, especially as the canteen food was greasy, so I ended up eating a lot of pot noodles and fruit in my room just to have something to fill me. So expanding my mind with some Graham Greene was very welcome.
I still have that T.S.Eliot book on my shelf. When it came to leave, the caretaker let the teachers each take a couple of books, seeing as they were only going to the charity shop anyway.
My reading spot.
The rest of the huge building was a maze. The majority of the doors were locked to prevent the kids from wandering around too much. One day when they were out on a trip and it was my day off, the caretaker gave me the key and said feel free to go exploring, because he had seen me taking photos.
The building was a strange mix of extremely grand, and extremely institutional.
The floors also didn’t quite run horizontally how you’d expect. Sometimes you’d walk along a long corridor and come out higher or lower than you expected.
Upstairs there were several floors of abandoned dorms. Going to boarding school is my idea of hell. School was okay for me because I went to a large school with a wide choice of people and not particularly strict rules, went home every day to do as I liked in my spare time, and had extra-curricular activities I went to outside school where I also had friends. Boarding schools tend to be small, and you’re locked in there with the other kids 24/7, having to live under school rules and organised activities all the time. Hell.
In fact, Neil Gaiman has a story where all the dead alumni return from Hell to a boarding school and haunt and torment a boy who has had to stay there over the holidays by himself. I also feel that a lot of the problems with our elite politicians and their lack of empathy stem from being sent away to boarding school at a very young age. In fact it’s known as “Boarding School Syndrome”.
There was something sad but fascinating about the abandoned bedrooms- they had probably seen a lot of unhappiness and teenage angst over the years.
Especially the ones full of broken furniture. The new owners must have got through a lot of skips.
Imagine being a teenager and never having any privacy unless you were on the toilet.
When I moved back to London about four months after I took these photos, I initially rented a short-term room off a rich Australian family who lived in Spitalfields. The sort where everyone was an ambassador’s child. The daughter was away at boarding school, and it turned out my room was actually hers (perhaps they actually had less money than it seemed). It had no trace of anything personal in there. Imagine shuttling between a school dorm, and an Air BnB room all the time.
Always having to keep your valuables locked up in a safe.
One of the main reasons the students were not allowed upstairs was that the caretaker didn’t want them messing around on the roof terrace. I image now it’s a luxury yoga retreat, the roof gets way more use.
There must have been legions of servants there in the stately home days. Most of the dorm rooms were clearly former servants’ rooms.
