Where other people have smothering parents and teenage dates, the men of Britain’s ruling class have traditionally had boarding school. Cold showers, constant beatings, the ambiguous privilege of “fagging” (whereby younger boys dance attention on older ones), have all provided endless material for George Orwell, Cyril Connolly, Anthony Powell. So potent is the lifelong spell of School that Graham Greene remained haunted by it even while spying in West Africa; John le Carré, when describing intrigues during the Cold War.
Into their company now steps Charles Spencer, with a furious and heartfelt assault on Maidwell Hall, the exclusive private school where he was interned from the ages of 8 to 13. Like many of his contemporaries, he remembers little of the place other than sexual abuse and a host of “vicious sadists,” who left scars on the buttocks and the souls of their former pupils, still visible 40 years on.
Anyone who remembers Spencer from the day when he stood up to the press and spoke of Princess Diana’s “innermost feelings of suffering” at the funeral of his elder sister will recognize the eloquent and outspoken prosecutor who here mounts an argument against the “outdated, snobbish, vicious little world that English high society constructed, endorsed and then handed over to the care of people who could be very dangerous indeed.”
So potent is the lifelong spell of School that Graham Greene remained haunted by it even while spying in West Africa; John le Carré, while describing intrigues during the Cold War.
Though he was a godson to the Queen and one of her pages of honor, Spencer was in many ways vulnerable from the beginning. His mother ran off with another man when he was two, leaving his father, eighth Earl Spencer, in what seems to have been a prolonged funk. Even while attending his “safe, warm and fun” primary school, the little boy was being taken by a nanny, along with Diana, to visit their mother once a month and, at a younger age, having his head banged against a wall by another of his many nannies.
Indeed, even before he was shipped off to Maidwell, he was dreaming repeatedly of a wolf reaching out to grab him while his father strode on, impervious. Spencer is an accomplished writer who has published seven books of history and adorns his story with quotes from Churchill and Solzhenitsyn, but he remembers himself in childhood as a “lost lamb.” When he asks his old friends how he seemed at school, one of them answers, “Very angry. All the time.”
That anger has hardly faded, and he writes here with commanding fluency, evoking every last squeaky floorboard and V-neck sweater in forensic detail. Maidwell Hall, with its imposing towers, comes to resemble something out of a gothic nightmare.
The senior matron whom the eight-year-old encounters on arrival has varicose veins that “reminded me of the bunches of black grapes that occasionally graced Park House’s fruit bowl.” Park House is the home he was already missing. At his father’s request, the matron asks an older boy to look after Spencer. As soon as the adults are out of earshot, the appointed protector, with yellow teeth and “dead eyes,” spits out to the little boy, “You’re on your own!”
I was shunted through the same classic assembly line as Spencer—a strikingly similar boarding school from the age of nine, followed by the same school and the same Oxford college that he attended seven years later—and every one of his details rings true.
The “slug-like nuggets” of porridge that we were forced to eat, quite apart from toad-in-the-hole, liver, and spotted dick. The teachers who flung hard objects at us and pulled, repeatedly, at our hair. The “blubbing” in the dorm after lights-out, as small boys clutched their teddy bears in place of Mummy. As his hated headmaster—“a venomous snake”—wrote to Spencer’s parents three weeks after he arrived, “He shows a lively imagination and he uses words to convey his meaning very well.”
In many ways, the central story of Britain in recent years has been the clash between the wounded, Californian inclinations of Diana (hardly mentioned here) and of Meghan and Harry, and the unswerving Keep Calm and Carry On of Queen and Crown.
Diana’s little brother, writing out of “decades of therapy,” sounds very much in his sister’s camp. Even in Althorp, his stately home, he is relegated to a “tiny room” in the attic with a night watchman patrolling outside, to protect against fire and burglars. When he describes the poisonous “dog’s mercury” that flourished in the Maidwell woodland known as “the Wilderness,” he might be reminding us that his title refers not just to his privilege but to the secrecy and code of omertà in which he was truly being schooled.
An argument against the “outdated, snobbish, vicious little world that English high society constructed, endorsed and then handed over to the care of people who could be very dangerous indeed.”
For me, the biggest shock in his story comes in his describing how an assistant matron of 19 or 20 started kissing and fondling him when he was just 11, while inviting one boy to her bed each term. I had always wondered why very young women, with no apparent qualifications, were deputed to supervise our twice-weekly baths; to read of the abuse the author suffers at the hands of this predator was in many ways even more startling than simply hearing of creepy men getting their kicks from caning half-naked boys.
Nearly every such school has been reformed since his day, Spencer admits, and it’s notable that Prince William, for one, seems to work hard to be a more attentive parent than his father or grandfathers were. Many of my friends from elementary school can’t help remembering the teacher who was later imprisoned for his torment of little boys or the sound of the footsteps of the other man who paced around our dorms at night, waiting to “whack” one of us with a tennis shoe. “I used to wonder what I’d done wrong,” one of my old friends recently told my wife, “to be expelled from my parents’ comfy home and sentenced to prison.”
Yet that friend emerged from his Marine boot camp as a brilliant diplomat who now instructs Britain’s future leaders. Boarding school is famous for its kill-or-cure intensity, but if it’s designed to prepare boys for a world that’s seldom likely to be soft, it succeeds on many fronts. Spencer does recall one teacher who really did seem warm and funny—and when the boy says how much he longs to be at a regular day school, his favorite teacher tells him, from experience, that they are often far worse.
I was recently corresponding—this seems a lifelong affliction—with a friend with whom I went through school for 10 years, discussing how strict our constraints had been. “True enough,” he said, “but maybe that’s what’s enabled you to work as a writer all your life.”
I wonder what Spencer would say to that. He does concede, near the end, that he received “an excellent academic education” and that “the friendships forged at this school were its golden legacy.” I grieve for all the ways he was scarred and traumatized at Maidwell, but in composing “the book of my life,” he seems to have got his own back quite royally.
Pico Iyer is a Columnist at AIR MAIL. He is the author of several books, including, most recently, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise and the upcoming Aflame, to be published in January 2025