TWO words haunt A Very Private School, Charles Spencer’s arresting misery memoir of his time as a boarder at Maidwell, in Northamptonshire. The first is privilege; the second is safeguarding. Allusions to his upper-crust contemporaries’ comfortable backgrounds pepper the prose, and Spencer is not blind to them. But he attempts, in part, to square that privilege with the awful sufferings that they shared in the 1970s under a brutal regime of systematic and ritual abuse.
Presiding over this grand guignol was the exclusive school’s demented and devious headmaster, Alec “Jack” Porch. His curriculum of cruelty — physical, emotional, verbal — crushed the spirits of prepubescent boys for 15 years until his retirement in 1978. Beatings were a daily occurrence, be it a “playful” two-fingered spank in the dormitory, a more serious slipper-smacking, or the bare-buttocked treatment in his study administered each evening with a cane: the Flick or, for something more serious, the Swish.
Corporal punishment was an at least occasional feature of most school life in the 1970s. For Maidwell boys, it was a daily reality. More sinister was the complicity between staff, prefects, and masters alike. They would all feed Porch’s lust — so violent that some bore the physical scars for decades. He was also a pervert. Favourites would be called for regularly: some were fondled; others were involved in “learning games”. The vulnerable were seduced into intimacy when they craved comfort and attention.
Spencer yearned for this, too. He would make himself sick in the vain hope that the school’s icy matron might show him sympathy. She never did. Instead, difference and weakness were further grounds for a beating. The violence was endemic. Pupils would “rag” one another in a daily bout of physical aggression. Masters were so heavy-handed that one boy passed out through the force of a classroom blow. His tears were reported to his parents, but not their vicious cause. Bullying was diabolically rife.
courtesy of the authorMaidwell boys in boiler suits, building a camp at the back of the school in 1975, in a photo from the book. Charles Spencer is in the front, second from left
Parents, Spencer feels, were similarly complicit. Their childcare responsibility had been “subcontracted” to a place that relieved them of its bother, and they gave it little thought between a term’s beginning and end, when the Rolls-Royces would sweep in and away again. Letters home went without much reading between the lines. Porch’s cynical, sardonic school reports kept suspicion at bay.
Religion was of little consolation. Weekly compline and daily prayers were all led by Porch without sincerity. On Sundays, he would force the boys to learn passages by heart from the Bible or the Prayer Book, after which they would go to the parish church for visits that engendered no pastoral care by the vicar.
Before he turned 13, Spencer was sexually abused at night by an assistant matron. He cut his arm with a penknife when he feared that she would leave. She selected pupils to share her bed in secret. Who knew about all this, he asks, and how much? By then it was too late. The damage had been done, to all and by all.
Therapy has helped, he says, and the book is catharsis. It deepens the pathos of his address at the 1997 funeral of his sister, Diana, Princess of Wales, in Westminster Abbey. The checks and balances of school inspection and regulation today mean that such horrendous experiences are almost impossible. Lessons learned.
Porch stopped pupils from approaching his desk with a fountain pen in hand. “Remember St Cassian,” he would say. The cruel fourth-century Roman schoolmaster was condemned for his Christianity and handed over to his pupils. They stabbed him to death with their pens.
The Revd Simon Walsh is a priest, journalist and school governor.
A Very Private School: A memoir
Charles Spencer
William Collins £25
(978-0-00-866608-8)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50