The Life of a Boarder in a Convent in the 1950s by Lucas PALATIN

I questioned my grandmother about her life at boarding school when she was young. She arrived at the boarding school when she was 15 years old in 1952. She couldn’t stay in her parents ‘house because they lived in the countryside and to be able to study my grandmother had to go and live in Chambery in a middle school called Jules Ferry. There were no places at their boarding house, so she was accommodated by the nuns in the nearby convent house. There were only girl boarders. The life in the convent was very strict. The boarders spent all their time there and they had only two supervised walks a week on Thursdays and Sundays after mass. Of course the boarders had to go to mass. My grandmother explained to me that she slept in a big room; there were fifty girls who slept in this room. It was a very big dormitory where it was cold because there was only a wood stove in the middle of the room to warm all the room. Then suddenly, my grandmother with a big smile told me: “I remember that one day the heating broke down, and there was smoke everywhere. At the time this heating broke down it did not make us laugh but now looking back I have a pleasant memory!”

In the boarding school, she ate especially soup because the nuns did not have a lot of money and because it was not very expensive to make. It’s the boarders who did the cleaning and the service. It was a very strict and controlled life but even if it was hard my grandmother never rebelled because she found it normal.

My grandmother left the boarding school only to go to study at Jules Ferry. The Jules Ferry middle school building had largely been destroyed during the Second World War and the replacement building was made of prefabricated cabins where it was either very hot or on the contrary very cold according to the season. In class my grandmother had to wear a blouse as all the others girls. She finished lessons at six o’clock in the evening and she returned directly to the boarding school.

My grandmother’s youth was thus very different from my youth today. She had very little freedom and her life, when she was young, was very controlled. She couldn’t go out in the evening to go to sport or spend moments with friends in town. Today we have many more liberties and we can do lots of things without being controlled. But when I asked my grandmother if she has regrets or if she would have preferred another route and another more free youth, she said that for her it was normal because it was the only life she knew and that thus she can’t know if she would have preferred to live differently.