Maidwell Hall school, Northamptonshire, 1972. The chief abuser is the headmaster, Jack Porch, who keeps two canes in his study, the Flick and the Switch, and patrols the school dorms at night in hope of catching pupils talking – in which case, he’ll pull any culprits over his knee and whack them with a slipper. Next comes Mr Maude, who forces boys to swim even if they can’t, with one victim – hauled from the bottom of the pool - needing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and who beats Charles Spencer with a cricket boot, its metal spikes puncturing his skin. And then there’s the hulking teacher whose signet ring draws blood when he thumps Spencer round the head, the trickles drying invisibly in the boy’s thick red hair.
Such was life in the private boarding school to which Spencer was admitted at the age of eight and which was so traumatising that it has taken him till now, after years of therapy, to record the damage. The tone is fervid. Pertinent quotes on childhood from Hilary Mantel, George Orwell, Graham Greene and others abet his case. More important, he has talked to many other Maidwell ex-pupils who still bear the scars of their years in an upper-class prison camp staffed by bullying paedophiles.
Spencer should never have gone there. He’d already suffered infant abandonment when his mother disappeared for six months and his parents divorced. But his older sisters, including Diana, were all at boarding school; to subcontract strangers in unpoliced regimes to look after your kids was what parents of his class did (and often still do). Before he went, Spencer had a recurring nightmare about a wolf pack. His arrival at Maidwell was no less terrifying. The older pupil delegated to keep an eye on the new boy was having none of it: “You’re on your own,” he spat.
With parents, on the rare, brief occasions they were allowed anywhere near the school, Porch was jovial and ingratiating; once they were out of the way, a sadist’s “cold, intimidating stare” took over. Boys would be summoned to him at night to make confessions or be given “extra lessons”, with any indiscretion or wrong answer punished by a spanking. Porch loved to fondle a freshly wounded bare bottom. Dried blood would stick to the victim’s cotton underpants.
The example of thuggery was passed down, through daily sessions of “ragging” in which students were encouraged to “burn off energy” in an aggressive free-for-all , and a thriving knife culture, with every boy expected to have his own sheath knife (Spencer had a commando dagger with a seven-inch blade). Along with the fighting there was fat-shaming and mockery of any boy judged to be a “palooka” or dunce. Porch wrote warm termly reports about the boys but in school he called them “tiresome” and “clueless”.
“I felt I had been sent away from home because I had somehow fallen short,” Spencer writes. He makes an exception for a couple of “potential saviours” among the teaching staff, including a Miss Vacqueray. But any benign influences were few and far between. At 11 he was moved to an upper dorm, into which a young assistant matron would creep by torchlight, sit on a bed, then French-kiss or have sex with whichever boy she’d chosen. “Lucky you”, men would later joke to Spencer. But the exposure to sex came too soon, destabilising his development and “awakening in me basic desires that had no place in one so young. I’d felt a vagina, when my friends were longing for a first kiss.”
What’s striking about the book isn’t just its vehemence and the therapeutic purpose it serves in allowing Spencer to “reclaim” his childhood, but the authenticating detail of his memory: the clothes people wore, their facial expressions and gestures, the idioms they used – it’s as if trauma has frozen these in time. Surprisingly, given his ordeal, he says he isn’t against boarding schools: at 13 he went on to Eton, a happier experience, and two of his seven children chose to be weekly boarders. (Maidwell School has said that it was “sorry” about the experiences Spencer described, and that “almost every facet of school life has evolved significantly since the 1970s”). He’s not especially critical of his parents, either, though his father, suffering from depression, failed to notice his misery and his mother, though seemingly desperate to hear him sing the first verse of “Once in Royal David’s City” as a soloist, failed to turn up in time. The complacency of that generation of parents enrages him – people who farmed out their offspring so as to be spared the grind of childrearing; who thought a tough regime would stop them being “wet”; who dismissed any complaint (even when voiced many years later) as self-pity.
Charles Spencer was one of the Queen’s godchildren and there may be readers who assume that the world he describes (servants, country houses, deep pockets) must have cushioned the impact of his traumas. If so, they’re wrong. Abuse is abuse wherever it happens. And if you didn’t already think it obscene for children as young as eight to be banished from home for two-thirds of the year, you will after finishing this account.
• A Very Private School by Charles Spencer is published by William Collins. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
• In the UK, the NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331. In the US, call or text the Childhelp abuse hotline on 800-422-4453. In Australia, children, young adults, parents and teachers can contact the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800, or Bravehearts on 1800 272 831, and adult survivors can contact Blue Knot Foundation on 1300 657 380. Other sources of help can be found at Child Helplines International.
