Charles Spencer is revisiting a traumatic chapter in his childhood in his new memoir, “A Very Private School." Spencer, the brother of Princess Diana and a journalist and author, recalls his years at Maidwell Hall, a prestigious board school in England and a place "without love," per his book.
Spencer alleges physical and sexual abuse by staff members at the prestigious boarding school.
Maidwell Hall told TODAY in a statement that it has notified the local authorities who investigate possible crimes against children. School officials are also encouraging any past students with similar experiences to come forward.
Spencer spoke with NBC News senior legal and investigative correspondent Cynthia McFadden in a conversation to air March 11. Read an excerpt of the book's forward below.
Read an excerpt
While writing my story I have inevitably taken a good look at what I believe is a fascinating aberration: the boarding school system as a whole.*
It’s a fact that many of the leading figures in British public life today— from prime ministers to royalty — have received the privilege of just such a private, boarding school education. While some thrived under benevolent headteachers, others have been wounded by wretched treatment during formative years. Some of this poisonous legacy they’ve unwittingly passed on to society. As Diogenes said in the fourth century BC: “The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.” If that education system is flawed, the state’s foundations will be, too.
What we suffered was not just a separation from all that we knew and loved, but an amputation from it.
Charles Spencer
I have to say — without wanting sympathy, but because it’s important to know the context to what follows — that it’s been an absolutely hellish experience at times, this chronicling of casual cruelty, sexual assault and other perversions from long ago. As I wrote this book, the crushing migraines that often felled me then returned. This, after forty-odd years of welcome absence. I’ve also had dozens of Maidwell nightmares. Fenn traps have gone off in my mind as I retraced the footpaths of my early schooldays. I have come to accept that they have snared part of my psyche forever.
The events I describe in the following pages all happened as written, and the character sketches are, I believe, accurate. The reported speech is as near to the truth as I can remember, and certainly conveys the meaning of what was said at the time. I have changed all the boys’ names—even though many said they were happy for their true identities to be used.
I wrote the body of this manuscript from my extremely clear recollections, which were seared into my brain as a child. The psychotherapists I have seen over the decades say that trauma at this age often leads to memories being expunged, but it can go the other way. Recollections can remain with the abused, vividly and forever, as they have with me. In addition, I have drawn on contemporaneous sources from my Maidwell years—my school reports from each of my fifteen terms there, as well as my diaries and my letters home.
Clearly, what I endured during five years in one of the most expensive private schools in England, during a time of solid political and economic stability, is not at all comparable with the terrible suffering of so many other children—now and in the past—forced to struggle to survive in landscapes of total despair. There is only the most tenuous of links between my privileged experience and the experience of those facing economic adversity and social exclusion: that of childhood trauma.
I’ve read avidly about childhood trauma, particularly those elements that are connected to emotional attachment. This area fascinates me because I experienced abandonment before being sent off to Maidwell. This was in the mid-60s, when I was 2, and my mother left home for a man she had fallen in love with.
Back then the discipline of a boarding environment was often thought to provide a stability that a “broken home” was believed to be incapable of. But I loved home, and most definitely did not want to leave it, even when it lacked a mother. Being transplanted to a strange and repressive place was the last thing I needed—especially as a child of divorce.
As a historian, as a product of the system, and as a man, I am fascinated by what on earth was going on at schools such as the one I attended. Why were parents blithely sending us away, to live with adults and children who were total strangers, in a clear rejection of family? Why replace this natural unit with an environment of often marked harshness?
There remain 630,000 boarders in 2,500 boarding schools in England now, but few of those institutions would have survived if they hadn’t evolved significantly from the time I write about.
If you look at Maidwell’s website today you will see there is a head of pastoral care, who has a deputy to assist them. The recently appointed headmaster declared, on taking up office: “I have been dedicated to education — education in its fullest sense — to seeing the whole child and their potential and helping them to achieve this.”
This was not the Maidwell that I knew. There was not one person in the structure of the place who had any responsibility for us young children beyond the tight confines of bookwork, discipline, the sports field, hygiene and nutrition. The emotional well-being of the child was not considered a specific need.
Our softest nerve endings were crushed by an experience that was irreversible in its distress. While a small number of boys, sadly, came from abusive homes, and were arguably better off in this harsh place, the rest of us had to learn to live without the comfort and protection of home. What we suffered was not just a separation from all that we knew and loved, but an amputation from it.
While this book describes a world of privilege alien to most, I hope it will resonate with anyone, anywhere — from all walks of life — who was ever made to feel frightened, powerless and abandoned as a child. For Maidwell, in the 1970s, was meant to serve as a surrogate home. But it lacked the most important quality of a home: It was without love.
*While many girls suffered similarly back then, of course, this book is my eyewitness account, with historical context, of the male system that I was an involuntary part of; it therefore—inevitably—focuses on the male side of the issue.
