Charles Spencer’s  recount the trauma of being sent away from home at the age of eight to attend a boarding school, where a culture of cruelty prevailed in the antiquated boarding school system. He reflects on the hopelessness and abandonment he felt aged eight, viscerally describing the intense pain of homesickness and the appalling inescapability of it all. Drawing on the memories of many of his schoolboy contemporaries, as well as his own letters and diaries from the time, exploring the long-standing impact of his experience. 

Privately educated posh boys are blamed for the country’s current mess. The Labour Party was promising to charge VAT on fees. 

A memoir from Charles Spencer, brother of Princes Diana, the late Princes of Wales offers a different context for the discussion. 

Spencer explains why many of those who attended expensive boarding schools were victims of child abuse, a traumatic environment may help to explain the damage that some posh boys have wrought on s society.

A Very Private School focuses on Maidwell Hall in Northamptonshire, where Spencer went in the 1970s, between the ages of eight and 13, Spencer knew boarding wasn’t for him – he had even watched Tom Brown’s Schooldays on TV- but his parents expected nothing less. The school duly proved to be “ an amputation” he writes , pastoral care didn’t exist. Medical care included expecting the boys to swallow laxatives without water if their bowels weren’t operating regularly, so as to minimise washing-up. Boys were beaten with a slipper if say they spilt their milk a few times; they were whipped with a cane for lying. The bully of a headmaster, Jack Porch, fondled some boys’ genitals, shortly after he beat their backsides Spenser alleges.

Charles Spencer, a ginger, chubby boy and a delicate soul, was bound to suffer at the age of nine, when he started to make himself vomit into a metal chamber pot at night. It was a cry for help, but no one is listening. Later, he was sexually abused by an assistant matron whom he calls only Please ( at Maidwell, oddly, boys had to address all female staff as “Please”, to instil good manners. He blames her of this decision, aged 12, to lose his virginity to an Italian prostitute during a family holiday. They fuck you up, your surrogate mum and dad.

The whole attitude to childhood was bizarre.

Spencer asks “ What were these men thinking , when exerting all their adult power against defenceless prepubescents?

Maidwell was academically successful, not least because struggling pupils are kicked out ( many brighter ones like Spencer, went on two Eton. Porch created a smoke screen by sending parents humorous report cards. May fathers had also endured boarding schools, and Spencer decides that they convinced themselves the experience was good for them. Spencer’s own parents  come across as neglectful and distant. When he as a toddler, his mother ran off to Australia with the man who would become Spencer’s step-father. At home, he was beaten from the age of four or five. One nanny would grab him by their hair and slam his head against a wall – or against Diana’s head. It “never occurred” to him to tell his parents the truth about Maidwell.

Spencer in A Very Private School cites George Orwell’s and Roald Dahl’s memoir of their boarding school days from a couple of generations earlier, the genre has continued to grow, recently including Musa Okwomga’s One of Them: An Eton College Memoir.

Spencer claims writing this book is how he and his contemporaries can reclaim their childhood, writing it gave him, he says. “ Crashing migrants” and dozens of nightmares. 

Spencer complains that his pony was given away, some of Maidwell’s hardships, such as sleeping in the same sheets for two weeks, may have been harder for Spencer, because, he, a  godson of Elizabeth II, came from luxury. But none of the hardships were softened by compassion: Maidwell, he writes, was “without love”.

Spencer says the boys were not left with their families “as nature intended” and concludes with a less radical suggestion : He is not against boarding schools, he jus think preteens should only go if they “truly want to” ( His sons chose to be weekly boarders, coming home at weekends.) If feels a bit timid.

 Very Private School: A Memoir by Charles Spencer, William Collins £25, 304 pages.