The brother of Diana, princess of Wales, talks about his difficult decision to write about being physically and sexually abused and the resistance he faced from members of his own class
t was one thing writing about the abuses of his childhood, Charles Spencer tells me, with half an ironic laugh; it’s quite another talking about them with strangers. When we meet in an office at his publisher, he is reeling a bit from this new fact of his life. The more sensational chapters of his memoir of a deeply traumatic five years at the Northamptonshire prep school Maidwell Hall had been splashed all over the previous week’s.
The idea that such a thoroughly sweet boy has had to live with that for the last 50 years is appalling to me “He was a fascinating case of a very intelligent paedophile sadist,” he says, “because he’d constructed a system that fed him little boys’ buttocks every night. He had this ability to present to parents a sort of charm and humour. But he was deeply deviant. A chilling presence. I received the audiobook today and I listened to the first bit again. The preface is about this incredibly sweet kid being systematically made to feel like nothing every day. I started crying, actually.
For all these efforts at normality, there are, inevitably, several moments in the book when you recognise him still to be imprisoned by his class, as much as his memories of school. He is at pains throughout to say he is well aware of his privilege, and that children in other circumstances clearly suffered far worse than anything he experienced or can imagine.
I wonder, when he was writing his book, whether any part of him felt like a “class traitor”, as some have suggested? One of the teachers who singled him out at nine years old for particular violence – a man he used to fantasise about meeting up with later in life in order to return a beating – is still alive. He calls him Goffie in the book . He has sent him a copy: “He’s very old now. But I just want him to know.”
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