A Very Private School

Charles Spencer (William Collins, £25)

IN his podcast, The Rabbit Hole Detectives, Charles Spencer comes across as a fantasy history teacher, bringing the past to life with a light touch and a smattering of toe-curling detail to hold attention at the back of the class. There’s nothing to snigger at, however, in this account of the abuse he suffered at his prep school, Maidwell Hall, Northamptonshire, in the 1970s. Lord Spencer told his publisher that he didn’t want it to be a ‘posh boy’s whinge’; he invokes the late Hilary Mantel in her memoir, Giving Up The Ghost: ‘I am not writing this to solicit any sympathy. People survive much worse and never put pen to paper. I am writing in order to take charge of my childhood.’ His book is not a whinge, however, and it goes beyond an exercise in demon-slaying; it’s an artful demonstration of the calamity that ensues when power falls into the wrong hands.

His account is unlikely to surprise anyone who boarded at a prep school before Esther Rantzen set up Childline in 1986 and the Education Act of 1992, both of which created a climate of greater transparency. More startling is his unpicking of the collusion by staff and the Stockholm Syndrome in some pupils who regard their experience as having engendered a resilience that was good preparation for later challenges. However, for the author and most of the contemporaries he interviewed, it cast a long shadow.

It’s also startling that Lord Spencer should reproach his eightyear-old self for not making a stand: ‘It amazes me still that I—always a stubborn child—meekly succumbed to the misery of the bleak path chosen for me. It just didn’t occur to me to rebel.’ Perhaps this sad tale will embolden others.