‘The New Headmasters’: A Poem on British Boarding Schools, by Lucius Falkland

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The New Headmasters

As I sat, that afternoon, upon his knee
While he read a “witty” book and I faux-laughed
I’m afraid, aged eight, I didn’t really see
What was happening: I now feel rather daft.
But “frottage,” back in Nineteen Eighty-Nine,
In an England run by toffs from public schools,
Such as Geoffrey Howe and Michael Heseltine,
Was, somehow, just about within the rules,
And in those public schools some men liked feeling,
Or caning boys’ bare, bottoms: “It’s tradition!”
“It makes them men! No knighthood without kneeling!”
So parents overlooked their boys’ perdition.

Fast-forward now to Twenty-Twenty Five
And the gentry, in Westminster, sit no more.
Influential heads are very much alive
But they’re women so they’re “caring” to the core,
Such that schoolboys may not be so much as touched,
“Ban running?” “Yes! The lad might trip and fall!”
A child, like a diamond’s, tightly clutched,
So he can’t be hurt, not even by a ball,
But the problem is he so “cannot be hurt”
That you may not even tell him he’s mistaken.
If he says he is a pig and rolls in dirt
Then he’s right and he might fear becoming bacon.

There’s no fondling in these schools, the cane’s long-banned,
But the teachers, most are women, will accept
When frightened, pining for a gentle hand
Or listening ear, a girl, emotions wrecked
On unexpected shards of dolomite,
As it hits her she must leave behind her toys,
Feels something in her life is not quite right . . .
Maybe she’s in fact one of the boys?
And here, perhaps, the fields of Eton play,
But in reverse; no birching, belt or sermon.
The adults just do as she says, obey;
Make her the grown-up, her life to determine.

As I sat, that afternoon, upon his knee
While he read a “witty” book and I faux-laughed
I’m afraid, aged eight, I didn’t really see
What would happen and how it was so daft
To think that one day, when I’m forty-four,
It could be any better than that time:
Yes, boys were groped or beaten to the floor,
And few of us would think to call it “crime,”
But now these girls, wrecked on these splintered rocks,
Lost life-boats smashing into some dark isle,
Have been given means their puberty to block,
Which has left them brittle-boned and infertile.

And some have had their breasts both cut away
And only then have seen they were confused.
Flogging, touching or this, either way,
Have they not both been horribly abused?
By adults whom you’d think that they could trust?
Whether sadists in black gowns who make boys cry?
And master-pederasts, concealing lust?
Or those who ask how girls “identify”?
Even though they’re far too young to even start
To mull on what they are and who they’ll be,
Such that they could rip their bodies clean apart?
Were we safer on those old headmasters’ knees?

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Lucius Falkland is the nom de plume of a writer and academic originally from London. His first poetry collection, The Evening The Times Newspaper Turned Into Jane Eyre, was published with Exeter House Publishing in 2025.