No escape: boys lean from the windows of their dorms at Eton College
© DAVID LEVENSON / ALAMY
Few writers enjoyed their time at prep school. Orwell hated his, St Cyprian’s in Eastbourne, and demolished it in an excoriating essay, “Such, Such Were the Joys”, that was published only posthumously in 1952 for fear of libel. Various issues of fact have since been disputed by his contemporaries, but the evocation of deprivation, psychological and physical cruelty and desperate homesickness is one that any alumnus of the prep school system can relate to immediately, with hideous clarity.
Orwell served his time from 1911 to 1916, and Charles Spencer, author of the new memoir A Very Private School, suffered at Maidwell Hall in Northamptonshire between 1972 and 1977. My own period of misery came between 1992 and 1994; years that I remember vividly. So it was with a mixture of anticipation and dread that I turned to Spencer’s account of his education, which he spent in an “outdated, snobbish, vicious little world”. It is a considerable shift from his earlier historical biographies, such as Killers of the King and The White Ship, and written with clear conviction and passion that make its occasional instances of repetition and overemphasis unimportant.
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