It seems Prince George will be following the royal footsteps taken by his father, the Prince of Wales, and uncle, Prince Harry. Kensington Palace confirmed that the future King will be attending Eton College as of September this year. Much like the young royals, I myself was educated at Eton — except I certainly wasn’t following in any footsteps.
Decidedly non-aristocratic and non-English in lineage, I was one of the handful of Italians at the school, possibly the first Italian to win the King’s Scholarship back in 2010 — the competitive exam which picks just over a dozen boys every year. When I put on the gown with “K.S.” sewn in the label, and posed for an official snap in front of the statue of Henry VI, my family was gleaming with pride. “You’re only 13 and you’ve already made it”, my grandmother beamed. From that moment on, the gown would weigh down on me, both making my future — and breaking my mental health in the process.
From the outset, it’s worth underlining that many of the rumours surrounding Eton – from Victorian corporal punishments to “fagging”, the bygone system where younger boys would act as servants for the seniors – are pure folklore. The school has all sets of idiosyncratic traditions and an arcane lexicon, true: I remember sitting in Chapel on weekday mornings, and reciting Latin prayers on Sunday. I remember selecting waistcoats at the end of summer for my School Dress.
On my first day at school, overcome by homesickness, I recall asking my matron if I could have a hug. She looked me, pained in the eyes, and said she couldn’t due to school policy. I’m still in touch with her — she remains to this day a caring, supportive person — but it was a reminder that we were inside a system where we were essentially severed from basic human affection for weeks on end.
That said, the environment I experienced was neither fundamentally malicious nor subterranean. Classism was an elephant in the room – which regular family doesn’t have £63,000 to cough up every year to send their sons there? – but it was never a source of open discussion.
Rather, the currency was one of existential angst about being part of the elite, and the immense pressure that came along with proving you had a right to belong. Eton wasn’t just any boarding school – there was a limelight cast upon it, and every boy who attends is well aware of that. While I was there, journalists would swirl around the school, and anti-Tory government protests would hold banners saying “Eton mess”. In a sense, when you’re at Eton, you’ve isolated yourself in a space with the unspoken conviction that the outside world distrusts and misrepresents you.
You float around in a bubble where you feel called to prove your right to exist in a world which sees you as a privileged relic — where the “O.E.” label is a scarlet letter rather than badge of honour. As a K.S scholar, this pressure was further amplified. I had to spend five years of my life proving something, and that ultimately rewired my brain.
Andrea was one of the handful of Italians at the school, possibly the first Italian to win the King’s Scholarship in 2010The scholarship exam already pitted me against a hundred or so boys at the age of 13, after which the handful of us (numerically ranked, at the time) “fortunate” enough to get it would board in the grand 15th century college, served by waiters in a lavish hall, and seated next to the “Oppidans” — the non-scholars — in our “divs”, or classes. We were taught how to wear our School Dress, how to engage with tourists asking us for pictures as we were shuttled between class. The minutiae of our day-to-day had a codebook. We were publicly ranked in end-of-term exams (“Trials”) at an end-of-term assembly, and the scholars who didn’t make the top crop were branded “dumb” and “unworthy of the title” by fellow students. There was no need for colourfully outlandish memories of “fagging”. The environment was one where scholars were often inadvertently pitted against each other, leading less to outright bullying than a deep sense of competition.
Unlike many other boarding schools, certain Eton houses like mine had individual rooms, rather than dorms, meaning it was easy to sink into solitude — potentially a source of comfort, but also a dangerous form of self-isolation in your teen years. At the time, I was deep in the closet and insecure about my identity. I had a sort of awareness that my existence sat uncomfortably within a laddish all-boys’ school. I attempted small, somewhat pathetic moments of rebellion through barely permitted clothing modifications, like bracelets or satchels. “Fagging” might not exist any longer, but it took my housemaster making a joke about one accessory of mine in front of my 75 other housemates to metaphorically “whip the gay” into submission.
This was far from exclusive to Eton in the 2010s, but it was not the easiest environment to grow up gay — there was not a single out student in my year. Last I heard, the school now has an LGBTQ Society, which almost seems surreal 10 years on. And so I learned quickly to repress many parts of my character, and internalise that my sole goal by the end was ensuring I fulfilled my implicit scholarly expectation: getting into Oxbridge.
By the end of my time there, the line for the school counsellor was long. I got into Oxford, and left Eton with an OCD diagnosis, a burgeoning eating disorder, and a Prozac prescription, utterly done with my time there and blinded to any of the happier parts of my five years, or of the opportunities it gave me through an undeniably thorough education.
Now, intense pressure is not an anomaly in adolescence. The difference is, in Eton, you were effectively secluded from the rest of the outside world. I got to see my parents a couple of hours every Sunday, before being rattled back in time for dinner and Latin prayers. Back then, the school pushed us to excel at all costs without the facilities and tools to deal with the aftermath.
A decade on, Andrea is openly queer, living a highly social life as a full-time freelance correspondent in RomeMy memories of Eton are complex, almost fever-dream-like, and with time, have soothed into a sort of cool, half-laboured nostalgia. I’m sure there were others who had a much happier time than me; perhaps those who didn’t feel the pressure of achievement so intently. Still, I have some fond memories. I recall my English teacher, who inspired me to pursue writing, whose witty, dark humour still makes me laugh to this day. I met friends who were undeniably brilliant and whose talents inspired me. When I reconnected with a few former classmates last year, the tone was evenly split between those nostalgic for the “school glory days” and those with a tacit sense of “we survived it all”.
A decade later, my life is unrecognisable. I’m openly queer, living a highly social life as a full-time freelance correspondent in Rome. And it also seems Eton has become unrecognisable. I haven’t stepped foot on the school’s grounds in the good part of a decade, but if its particularly animated Instagram is anything to go by, the school seems like a more inclusive, supportive place than it was when I was there — or, at the very least, their social media manager is deft at PR.
I’m sure Prince George will be equipped with the best of the best, and modern awareness around mental health is far superior to 15 years ago. I hope he manages to find his lane and pursue his passions — the school certainly has many societies for that — while also not being afraid to stop and ask for help if things get overwhelming.
Eton is a bizarre place, reviled by many outside and inside, but in its own eccentric way it’s uniquely British and preserves unique traditions — the Greek declamation being one that recently went viral on social media — that would otherwise die out our modern world. While admitting to this may seem a betrayal of my leftist, republican soul, I do want it to still have a place in Britain, whatever that may be. I just hope that all boys there — including Prince George, who already carries a huge weight on his shoulders — can be taught that you don’t need to prove your excellence to the world: you can just be.
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