Author: Charles SpencerEngland | c 1970 to c 1980 | Biography: general | Memoirs | True stories of heroism, endurance & survival | Child abuse | Independent schools, private educationPublished on 14th March 2024 by HarperCollins Publishers (William Collins) in the United Kingdom.Hardback | 304 pages 163mm x 244mm x 30mm | 540g THE #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER Shocking and moving Guardian A tour-de-force Washington Post At eight years of age, Charles Spencer was sent away to one of England’s most exclusive boarding schools. In this courageous and beautifully written memoir, Spencer offers a clear-eyed, first-hand account of the strange secrets of the school, and the culture of cruelty and abuse he witnessed and experienced in his five years there as a pupil. Drawing on the memories of many of his schoolboy contemporaries, as well as his own letters and diaries from the time, the book is his attempt to come to terms with the deep emotional scars inflicted upon him. Spencer reflects on the misery, hopelessness and abandonment he felt aged eight, viscerally describing the intense pain of homesickness, the vicious brutality of a boys’ school in the 1970s and the appalling inescapability of it all. The book cracks the code of the unpoliced regime that ran the place and provides important insights into an antiquated boarding school system. He gives vivid portraits of the teachers and other staff placed in loco parentis, their casual cruelties and toxic obsessions. All these years later, Spencer’s bafflement at their motivations to inflict such cruelty on young children is palpable. As is his fury that, even if somehow he had spoken up, he’d never have been believed. Charles Spencers book A Very Private School was a Sunday Times bestseller w/c 11-03-2024.
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