Maidwell's headmaster, John Porch - whom we nicknamed Jack - enjoyed beating us with a slipper for the most trivial of offences, such as talking after lights out, says EARL SPENCER
Maidwell's headmaster, John Porch – whom we nicknamed Jack – enjoyed beating us with a slipper for the most trivial of offences, such as talking after lights out.
He listened with evident disappointment as your misdemeanour was read out by the head boy, then issued a short denunciation of your conduct, before flicking a slipper from foot to hand and beckoning you towards him. The head boy would be told to leave the room. Jack would tell the pupil to drop his trousers and underpants before administering the strokes in private.
A Maidwell friend of mine, who died a few years ago, spoke of how, during a caning in the study, Jack reached down with his hand to cup the boy's scrotum. Jack's chief henchman was the Latin master, the Honourable Henry Cornwallis Maude, a vicious sadist with a powder-keg temper. In later life, he became High Sheriff of Kent.His stock-in-trade was to throw chalk and board markers at us during lessons. He also cuffed us hard about the head and yanked us by the ear as he twisted it round, enjoying the screams of agonised protest.
Adult anger seemed to burn like an eternal flame at Maidwell. Another master, Thomas Goffe, was a seething human cauldron who had a visceral loathing of privilege. Since many of Maidwell's pupils were the offspring of aristocrats, landowners, and of England's great banking, brewing and manufacturing dynasties, his normal setting was boiling-point.
When I mentioned to one former Maidwell contemporary recently that I had been sexually abused at Maidwell, he immediately named the member of staff responsible. 'I always knew,' he said. 'But how?' I replied. We had been friendly as boys but, being in separate years in a rigidly hierarchical place, never confidants.To my horror, he told me of his being sexually assaulted at Maidwell three times, when aged nine, by someone who was meant to protect him.
He stopped and stared into the distance before alighting on the label to place on memories of his five Maidwell, years: 'Fear,' he said. He sniffed, embarrassed in an English way at having revealed something that might be seen as a weakness or failure.'Waiting to be beaten yet again, for God knows what.' He blinked hard, a successful 60-year-old man suddenly reconnected with the vulnerable boy he had been, caught in the tendrils of overwhelming sadistic rituals.
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