— 14 Mar 2021, 11:24 by Mark Elliott
Childhood years are called formative with very good reason.
We are naturally all focused on the impact that the pandemic is having on our present daily lives. Who wouldn’t be? We are all collectively faced with the profoundly shocking number of daily deaths being reported, the economic hardships and uncertainties being endured by vast swathes of the world and even limitations on our very basic physical interactions and movements.
Accepting all of this, I still feel compelled to share with you that my playing of rugby at school as a child and a French trip organised by the school when I was about fourteen years old have very much been at the forefront of my mind in the last few months.
I promise you that this seemingly strange focus isn’t because I am in some way seeking escapism from the challenges of the present, attractive as that would be. It is actually because I have found myself thinking about the timing of the pandemic and the impacts it would have had on me had it have happened at different times in my life.
I believe that this has given me a valuable perspective when processing and coping with the pandemic and influences my views on what it all means for me personally and professionally going forward.
The pandemic has happened for me when I am in my mid-fifties, having spent the last ten years of a varied career building and running a specialist school trip business with my wife in rural France. There have been any number of phases of my life when the pandemic would have been terrible. In fact, of course, there is no time that I can think of when it would have been good.
The thing is, when I look back, there is a clear winner for the time when it would have been the worst for me. That would have been my secondary school years. I can say that with confidence, even though the successful life I have created with my wife is deeply impacted and in peril, creating profound long term financial uncertainty for us.
I loved my secondary school, which was a state boarding school. I’m not so sure I could have told you how much I liked it at the time, of course. The perspective of a few years on the clock has made me realise this, and the pandemic has only served to heighten that feeling.
This realisation is doubtless created by the many opportunities for self-discovery and influences that my school life provided me with, some elements of which I am probably still blissfully unaware of to this day.
I can confidently say that there are two elements of my time at that school that I am very aware of and that I know have profoundly shaped my subsequent life. One is revealed in some character-based traits that I feel made me meet and befriend people of profound importance to me, and the other has shown itself in a more practical but no less important way in my daily life. Both outcomes, to me, are the very definition of formative.
The first is that I played a lot of rugby at school. When I sat my A level exams, we all found out that I had played a little too much! (That is perhaps a story for another day). The main point here is that I was freely able to play something which I would have missed out on for two years had the pandemic struck the world then.
Through rugby, I learned so much about myself. I became a team player, sharing experiences and, as a result, bonding with my teammates. I met people like me playing rugby and was able to find my place and role in the group. I have since discovered that once these lessons were learnt, they could be applied to whatever team I played in, even if rugby wasn’t involved.
At the same time, because of the social nature of team sports, I became more sociable myself. After school, I went on to university but was never destined to be an academic. I took the more social route through my years there, and this led to me making lifelong friends whose presence in my life I cannot imagine being without.
The point is that my school years of rugby gave me the social and interpersonal skills and appreciation of others that I would have missed and hence been poorer for.
The second impact I can explicitly point to is that I have lived in France for the last ten years directly because of a school trip when I was about fourteen years old.
I grew up taking holidays in the UK and never went abroad, which was standard at the time. It is fair to say that everybody I knew thought that everything in the UK was better than anywhere else in the world. The closer to home, the better. That changed from the first day I spent in France on my school trip.
We did a very long day in the coach to get to the hostel we were using, and I needed to freshen up. I walked into the shower, blissfully unaware that I was about to have a serious moment of revelation. I turned the shower on and got totally soaked, instantly.
This drenching was a total revelation to me. I had only known showers that were plastic pipes attached to the bath taps when needed, which provided the most pathetic flow of water. You just didn’t get wet like that in an English shower. Ever. Oh, and that is without even talking about the idea of higher water pressure.
Up to that point, I was just somewhere that looked pretty much the same to me as home, just the words on the signs in the hostel were spelt differently, and I noticed that the post box was yellow.
What the surprise of the shower did was prove to me in the most graphic way that I was somewhere different. Although lots looked the same, things were different, and perhaps even more shockingly, they could be better.
I was hooked from that moment onwards on new things and threw myself totally into the week. It is a week that I remember better than any individual week of my school years. Just as in my rugby playing, I found travelling away from home with my friends the most fantastic experience. We learnt to spend and enjoy time together and discovered so much about each other and, of course, ourselves when we were away from our regular home and school environment.
We became better friends, which fed directly into the quality of my later years at the school and me being a more socialised person. It also crucially led to me having a lifelong love of France and ultimately brought me full circle to move here and organise and provide school trips for other young people.
Amusingly perhaps, proof of this long term impact on me is shown in the attached photograph. When my wife and I renovated our dream house in France, my strong memories of that shower led to us installing the most enormous shower we could find.
This full-circle gets me to the heart of what I am writing about today.
Since the pandemic’s start, we would have had about 2000 children visit us who couldn’t come. They haven’t had the chance to make their own memories and discover things about themselves and the world they live in as I did. They haven’t been able to broaden their horizons, and tragically the pandemic has created precisely the opposite effect. They are living in a smaller world than any of us could have predicted.
They also haven’t been able to play rugby or any sports that would give them lifelong physical and social skills. Those are the things that would have made the pandemic happening to me back then the very worst of timing.
Of course, for other children, other experiences and influences would be just as great a loss as I imagine travelling to France and rugby would have been for me. I am just so aware of the tragedy unfolding. We will have a cohort of children going through these critical developmental years of their lives and being so negatively affected.
I have heard many people say how difficult they think the pandemic is for a particular age of person, but to me, the younger members of our society are the most at risk of long-term harm.
I have led a fulfilling life from some basic building blocks that I would never have had in place had the pandemic struck during my school years. Simply, I would have lost the opportunities I have subsequently enjoyed forever, and I would have been so much poorer as a result.
For me, there is something very positive in planning my fight back and punching the pandemic firmly in the face. The practical disruption of the pandemic on our business and personal life has taken considerable time and strength to deal with, but it has also made us think of the future. That has to be something we can all commit to making as bright as possible for those who have been the most damaged.
So what am I going to do with this self-knowledge? That is something I am looking forward to sharing with you very soon now that a touch of clarity has emerged for me out of the chaos sown in the last year. I know that I am determined that we will work every day to reduce the harm being done to young people. Luckily for us, we happen to work in a field that will allow us to take tangible and practical steps to do this.
If you feel that the most significant impact on you is right now, I am truly sorry and hope you find help and support from others who understand just how bad the timing is for you. If you think that another time would have been worse, I hope that thought might give you some comfort and perspective as we all deal with the present.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. I would value any feedback and insights you might have.
