“Sorry we’re late, Amy just lost her signet ring!”, a friend yelled down the phone.
My friends back home in Cape Town were unfazed when I later retold this story. I don’t blame them – I would have been too. But oh, my time at Pollock Halls had by then taught me a few things, maybe not quite yet the severity of losing a signet ring, but definitely what they were (and what kinds of people had them).
Living in London for seven months before university started felt like a free pass into many conversations in Pollock. I was relieved that, although I had no idea what “rounders”, “grammar schools”, “Tom’s trunks”, or “the races” were, I could vaguely nod along when they talked about where in North London everyone was from.
I had assumed that we would be on relatively equal footing when it came to meeting new people, that only a few from each school would already know each other, but what are the chances of them all being in one accommodation?
Having gone to a school in South Africa, I had a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card for the dreaded “what school did you go to?” question. What has been defended as a way to “get to know” people had started to feel like a process of unintentional social exclusion.
I really do understand the natural human tendency to find ways to relate to each other; it would be naïve to see it as an entirely classist and consciously excluding choice. However, before coming to Pollock, I had never been surrounded by so much wealth, even coming from a place where the economic and racial inequality is one of the worst in the world.
Even the wealthiest people I knew went on one — maybe two — holidays a year. And that was limited to the elite. So to suddenly be surrounded by people who seemed genuinely concerned that I had NEVER been skiing and that I had to apply for a visa for the EU left me feeling a bit bewildered.
That being said, many of the people I met were kind, interesting, well-intentioned, and would hate to be grouped with the occasionally blatantly problematic students (highlights include me being asked if I wasn’t “too white to be South African”).
Back home, Pollock had been presented as the “ultimate Edinburgh experience.” Intimidated by having no friends in London or Edinburgh, I thought it would be a good way to meet loads of people pretty fast. And it was.
But I always wondered how much my (slowly developing into English) accent, the fact that I could nod along to conversations about which London parks everyone had drank in when they were 16, and my full time job’s income that allowed me to frequent Cowgate (the cost of which sent me into consistent freakouts when converted back into South African Rand) had played into my easy “integration” with the Pollock crowd.
In the months between the end of my South African school term and the start of university, I had worked full-time in London for a healthcare company as a patient services administrator with my mostly working-class colleagues; and so to conclude — the switch to Pollock felt like I had stepped into a caricature of what South Africa would imagine a “posh English boarding school” to be like.
“Chancellors Court 7405” by Chemical Engineer is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.