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A Very Private School (Hardback)
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A Very Private School (Hardback)

(author)
£25.00
Hardback 304 Pages
Published: 14/03/2024
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Waterstones Says

Narrated with sensitivity and eloquence, the revealing memoir from historian and podcaster Charles Spencer details the scarring experiences of abuse he suffered during his five years at one of the country's top boarding schools.

"When you think of the school, what’s the one word that comes to mind?”

“Fear”

As a young boy of eight, Charles Spencer was sent to one of the most exclusive boarding schools in England. A Very Private School tells the shocking story of the abuse he endured during his five years there.

Now a bestselling historian and podcaster, Charles’ school years remain seared in his psyche with the scars impacting the rest of his life. This beautifully written and deeply sensitive memoir is the culmination of many years’ reflection on his feelings of misery, hopelessness, and abandonment whilst at the school. He captures viscerally the intense pain of homesickness, the vicious brutality of a boy’s school in the 1970s and the appalling inescapability of it all. 

The book offers a clear-eyed account of his experiences, 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 he had spoken up, he’d never have been believed. It is an honest reckoning with his past and a  reclamation of his childhood through his memories and those of his contemporaries. It deserves to be an instant classic.

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN: 9780008666088
Number of pages: 304
Weight: 500 g
Dimensions: 240 x 159 x 30 mm


MEDIA REVIEWS

'Top marks for its searing frankness, framed in wistfully beautiful prose’ The Times ‘Spencer is acutely observant of the myriad power imbalances at play within this imperial throwback. There has been a steady stream of books about boarding schools in recent years… but two things mark Spencer out from the crowd. First, he is by title and birth the ultimate establishment man, but he’s still prepared to take on the shibboleths of his class and upbringing. Second, his turn of phrase is often delightful. A painstaking and traumatic process, but one for which any reader must surely give a cheer' Daily Telegraph ‘Moving… A heartbreaking memoir of a childhood endured at a boarding school ‘without love’, where abuse was shockingly commonplace’ Financial Times ‘This is a story with a clear remit: to confront the British school system with the abuses it has long enabled. There are many graphic details in this book but the allegations have the most impact when read here as a grander narrative about power and how it is abused. As an individual testimony to the abuse that scarred a lifetime and hobbled his marriages, it is a tour de force' Washington Post ‘Moving and beautifully written, what Spencer’s courageous book reveals will be horribly familiar to the thousands of us who endured the same vile abuse in dozens of schools that were clones of each other. Most of us will go to our graves with the wounds unhealed' Louis de Bernieres 'This is a powerful, unforgettable story of childhood trauma, and the dark secrets and savagery of the past, told with a searing honesty and clarity that is ultimately redemptive' Justine Picardie

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