If you’d like some perspective to fill you in on what Lewis’s school experiences might have been like, the gay intellectual and writer Stephen Fry has written an autobiography in which the first volume extensively covers his own experiences at an elite English boarding school.
While he too found the system cruel in terms of corporal punishment administered by prefects, he also found the culture of rather implicitly accepted romantic/sexual relationships to be a bright note. He writes in fairly glowing terms of falling in love and describes an ethos free of coercion in that respect.
His first novel repeats some of the same material found in the first volume of his autobiography, treating again the positive aspects of loving relationships at an elite boarding school.
