WHILE I am sure there are plenty of great state primary schools in and around Windsor and can’t understand why Prince William and Kate don’t use one of those for their children, at least George, Charlotte and Louis will be day pupils at their new school.

Aged four, Louis would be too young to be packed off to boarding school, but at seven and nine, his siblings have had a lucky escape in being sent to fee-paying Lambrook School near the family’s new home on the Windsor estate.

It’s staggering that parents send their children away as young as seven. To send a child away at any age seems horrific to me but when they’re not long out of nappies you’ve got to ask yourself why.

Youngsters of primary school age in particular need their parents; they need love and attention, they need support and reassurance and they need a cuddle and kiss before bed on a night.

Not seeing your mum or dad for months on end and having to be practically and emotionally self-sufficient from such a young age is psychologically damaging.

My husband was a border, first at a prep school in Northumberland, miles away from his family in Cheshire, and then later in Hertfordshire, when his parents lived even further away, in Africa,

He took me to his prep school once to have a look round. It was grand, if slightly grim looking. I imagined my husband being dropped off there as a child and found it quite upsetting.

Inside, the little dormitory curtains printed with zoo animals and the coat hooks set low in the communal bath - “Matron would wade in with a loofa” - brought a lump to my throat. “I’d have run away,” I remember telling him. “Where would you go?” he replied.

My husband was 11 when he went and says he was not unhappy there, but admitted that he would far rather have been at home with his family. Being sent away changed his relationship with them forever.

Boarding school, he tells me, breaks most of the bonds you had with your parents and they gradually become irrelevant to your life. He certainly behaved very differently around them than I did with my parents. His manner was stiff and awkward, rather like someone having a job interview.

As Robert Graves once wrote in his novel ‘Goodbye to all That’, ‘School life becomes the reality and home life the illusion.’

My husband was at his senior school for five years and in all that time not one master called him by his first name or, I suspect, even knew it.

His father went there and was miserable, yet still sent his son, as though it is a necessary rite of passage.

I know that boarding schools are not the brutal affairs they once were with bleak surroundings, beatings and abuse taking place. But however comfortable they are you can’t get away from the fact that parents are entrusting the care of their children to other people - strangers.

However much money I had, I wouldn’t do it. To send a child aged under ten is particularly inhumane.

Whatever age kids are dispatched, boarding school makes them internalise their emotions and adopt the stiff upper lip attitude that carries on into adulthood. I should know, I deal with it every day from my husband.

For Prince George I imagine the reprieve from being sent away won’t last long. I’d like to be proved wrong, and hope I am, but in two or three years’ time he will more than likely be dropped off with his trunk at Eton, Harrow or some such place to fend for himself.