<
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/mar/17/earl-charles-spencer-a-very-private-school-interview>
"It 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
Mail on Sunday. The following
morning, he had been a guest on Lorraine Kelly’s mid-morning TV sofa, raking
over the painful detail of that long-buried past for the viewers. As a result,
he says, apologising if he seems a bit strung out, he’s had two days of
thumping headaches followed by vivid nightmares.
The early responses to his book about being sent away from home to be
brutalised at school at eight years old have been instructive. On the one hand
he’s had a mailbox of emails from fellow survivors, praising his courage in
speaking up for the generations of “privileged” schoolboys and girls who, like
him, suffered serial beatings and sexual assault in the closed world of
boarding schools well before puberty.
On the other he’s experienced the default prurience of the tabloid press, which
picked over his book for clickbait (ever since Spencer stood up in the pulpit
at Westminster Abbey and blamed redtop journalists for hounding his sister,
Diana, to death, he seems to have been considered fair game). The
Sun, for
example, thought the most appropriate headline for a book about the lasting
harm of childhood trauma to be “Di Bro’s sex at 12 with hooker”. The food
writer William Sitwell, a near contemporary of Spencer’s at Maidwell and Eton,
meanwhile, blithely dismissed the substance of the memoir in two columns in the
Telegraph. In the first, Sitwell branded Spencer a traitor to his class: “One
of their own – an earl, uncle to princes, seriously landed, stately housed,
replete with a deer park, fine furniture and fabulous paintings – is dishing
the dirt from within…” he wrote. In the second, he argued, bizarrely, that
“Spencer has not suggested that, beyond corporal punishment, he or anyone else
was a victim of abuse”."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
