Much more than a posh boy's misery memoir
A Very Private School is an exposé of the British aristocracy's tradition of sending children away to boarding schools and of the particularly cruel abuse — both corporal and sexual — that Charles Spencer, Princess Diana's brother, and his classmates suffered at one school, Maidwell Hall, in the 1970s. Like his nephew Harry's book, this is a posh boy's misery memoir. There are echoes of that book, but this is a more highbrow, self-aware work. Unlike Harry, the 9th Earl Spencer fills his pages with apologetic references to his privilege. “I am not writing to solicit any special sympathy,” Spencer begins, echoing the words of Hilary Mantel's 2003 memoir: “People survive much worse and never put pen to paper. I am writing in order to take charge of my childhood.”
This is a story with a clear remit: to confront the British school system with the abuses it has long enabled. There are graphic details in this book, but the allegations have the most impact when read as a grander narrative about power and how it is abused. One of Spencer's contemporaries reports that his memories of Maidwell are so traumatic that he can see them only in black and white.
Spencer, destabilized by his parents' divorce and his mother's departure, was sent off to Maidwell Hall. There he was introduced to a world in which teachers brutalize pupils, and the older pupils pass the same cycle of violence onto younger ones. Spencer names teachers responsible for the abuse only if they are now dead, to avoid British defamation law. Spencer changed the names of the boys in the book, though “many said they were happy for their true identities to be used.” One, a man he calls Thomas Scot, attests to being knocked unconscious at nine by a teacher during a Latin class. The same teacher, Scot alleges, boasted about knowingly leaving him with an untreated break to his collar bone for four days following a sporting event.
The headmaster, named by Spencer as Jack Porch, would summon boys to his study for extra lessons, punishments and religious “confessions.”
His targets were handsome and blond. Spencer writes that Porch sexually abused these boys while he hit them with his cane or his hand. Another master would take his favourites on nude swimming trips. One preteen was told he could enter the water only via “the human slide” — meaning intimate contact with the body of the teacher.
Spencer was being abused by a young woman, the young assistant matron. The abuse started when Spencer was 11. The perpetrator bribed children with the promise of late-night sweets to stay awake as their dorm-mates slept. For readers who may struggle to understand why a woman whom Spencer recalls as 19 or 20 years old sought sexual satisfaction from such young boys, Spencer agrees: “I've long since given up trying to understand what lay behind her actions. It's beyond my comprehension . ... All I can do is to say what happened.”
Spencer, justifiably, blames his school abuser for “awaking in me basic desires that had no place in one so young.” Other boys with whom the matron had gone further boasted of it. “You can't put the genie back in the bottle, as the cliché goes,” he writes, “and this childhood abuse meant ... I felt a compulsion to lose my virginity as soon as the chance arose.” At age 12, he went to a prostitute. “There was no joy in the act, no sense of arrival, no coming of age.”
The full details of this theft of innocence, with Spencer's step-by-step examination of the school matron's methods of emotional manipulation, make horrific reading. When his abuser threatened to leave the school, Spencer began cutting himself to show his devotion.
Maidwell Hall continues to educate the British elite. In a statement, it said that it had been “sobering ” to learn of Spencer's experiences, but “almost every facet of school life has evolved significantly since the 1970s.”
The story comes just as British papers publish speculation about whether young Prince George will follow the boarding school tradition.
As an individual testimony to the abuse that scarred a lifetime and hobbled his marriages, it's a tour de force. How many other men at the top of British society, Spencer leaves us wondering, are carrying similar scars?