On one blissful, cloudless day during the summer holidays of 1972, Charles Spencer, who had just turned eight, surveyed the scene in his mother’s garden in Sussex. He’d spent the morning cycling and swimming, and a barbecue was being prepared. He remembers thinking: ‘This is too good to last.’ And he was right. A date he was dreading, 12 September, arrived. His father drove him the 100 miles from his house on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk to Maidwell Hall, the boarding prep school in Northamptonshire where Spencer would be a pupil for the next five years.
We all remember that end-of-summer-holidays dread: the savage haircut, the putting on of itchy school uniform after months in cotton. Spencer evokes this brilliantly in his unputdownable memoir A Very Private School. For him, though, and for each of the new boys in the dormitory, the contrast between their summer holidays and their new conditions was shockingly and terrifyingly stark.
Wrenched from the gentleness and love of home, they found themselves in an icy institution, ‘patrolled and controlled by a headmaster intent on inflicting pain on the boys in his care’. A word Spencer uses often in this book is ‘danger’. Maidwell Hall was a place of constant danger, where the boys spent every waking hour in vigilance and fear.
Spencer’s horrific, graphic account of his years in this abusive hellhole made me hate quite a few of the repulsive adults there. First on the list is the senior matron, Mrs Ford, known as ‘Granny Ford’. ‘Charles has never spent a night away from home before,’ his father confided to her on the day of arrival, ‘and I was wondering – only if it’s not too much bother, Mrs Ford – if perhaps somebody kind from among the older boys might keep an eye on him till he finds his feet.’
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