Earl Spencer doesn’t look back on our boarding school fondly, but it did me a world of good
I was 17 years old when it suddenly dawned on me why I always felt nervous at around 4.30 in the afternoon. It had started some 10 years previously. You see, at my prep school, tea-time was when the order went out to “Come down!”
We would be in the dining room, scoffing our tea – or in my case, invariably not eating any of the filthy muck offered – when the head boy would stride in, a hush would descend and he would read out a list of the day’s offenders.
As we sat on three long tables, devouring the likes of shepherd’s pie and cabbage – there was always cabbage – it was telling that no one ever had to call for order. There was no bell or shout to stop talking. We just fell silent. We knew. This was the centrepoint of the day. Each of us boys was fascinated and eager to know who the miscreants were; the terror that it was you, the glee in realising it was someone else.
Now I wasn’t a particularly naughty boy and was punished more for being lazy than wicked. But the memories of what ensued have never left me. And if they ever subsided they are gushing back now because that school, Maidwell Hall, is suddenly infamous, its name emblazoned across the media. Because the memories of one famous Old Maidwellian are being told in a new book: A Very Private School: A Memoir by Earl Spencer, released on March 14.
In searing detail he describes the “antiquated” system, the “abandonment” he felt, aged eight, at being driven to and left there, the intense homesickness he experienced and the “appalling inescapability” of it, both in terms of what he felt was incarceration at the school and how the misery of it impacted his later life and ruined the lives of others.
So, having endured the place myself, it made me rather wonder about it. Particularly as his book, published by Harper Collins, is listed on the company website under not just “memoir” and “independent schools” but also under the categories “child abuse” and “true stories of survival of abuse and injustice”. Although Spencer has not suggested that, beyond corporal punishment, he or anyone else was a victim of abuse.
Spencer experienced Maidwell in the 1970s and then, as I did, Eton College, and is a mere five years older than me. That puts us in the same era, but as he attempts to tear down the private boarding school system and see this peculiarly English tradition collapse to dust, is he right? Is this just? If he was (or is) a victim, surely we are too.
Thus that tea-time tradition comes to the front of my mind. And, on the face of it, maybe Spencer has a point.
Once the names were called we were marched out of the dining room and down to the “private side” of the headmaster’s quarters – down a dark passage, past the kitchens where that smell of cabbage intensified, and then into lighter, grander surroundings. Which was as good as it got.
We lined up in the hall, our eyes on the door of a small office into which the head boy had just walked. He soon reappeared, then walked past us to an alcove next to the fireplace where he picked up a pair of crimson slippers, smartly lined with firm black soles. He paraded the slippers past us and went back into the study. Then one by one we were called in. Our crime was put to us and then, having acquiesced to it, unbuckled our belts, pulled down our trousers, turned and bent over, the headmaster deciding on the number of whacks to administer.
Worse crimes met with the cane, which rested beside a bookcase and which I on several occasions felt the full force of; my crime being a poor weekly scorecard.
The man dishing out the punishment seemed to me a remote figure. His name was Mr Porch. And he was one of a cast of extraordinary characters who presided over the place.
Mr Johnson, who taught Latin, was shell-shocked from the war. It showed in the unusual way he would write on the blackboard: long staccato swipes down the board.
The matron, Mrs Ford, whose shoes clickety-clacked down the long passages, and her assistant matron, Miss Darling, who we all fell in love with and ached to be tucked up in bed by or, better still, sponged in the bath.
There was sweet Annie, the cook, Frank the kindly odd-job man who could fix anything in his workshop and Mr Powell, who scrubbed potatoes and lived opposite the old gym in the woods in a hayloft, surrounded by cats.
The school was an austere building of dark Northamptonshire stone with four towers set in large gardens with a lake, sports fields and an unheated swimming pool. Our days began with star jumps on the gravel at the front and on rainy days, if sport was called off, we did “Front Gate Back Gate” – a march along the drives to get air into our lungs. On Sundays we wrote letters home, the presiding master stalking the room to check we had completed the requisite two sides.
There was a tuck shop which opened after tea most days and we could queue up and buy bon bons with whatever cash was left in our small account and there was a table outside the dining room where letters were placed; missives from home and, for some lucky boys, parcels.
On a Friday we were taught dancing by two old ladies, and sometimes, at the weekend, a projector was set up and films were shown. It always seemed to be the same one: a black and white film of King Kong. And there were set times to “rag” in the hall. Sort of sanctioned fighting. The less legal battles took place in the woods: known as the Wilderness. There the older boys built a den: a hole in the ground covered with corrugated iron. Gang warfare – as it was known - would be unleashed at morning breaktime and God forbid if you were a younger boy, a “squit”, captured and taken to that lair for a spot of “torture”…
I was still seven years old when I arrived to board at Maidwell in 1976. It was a small school which was established at its current location in 1933 and had just 70 boarding boys. The older boys looked to me like men, although none were older than 11, but I quickly settled on making good friends and exerting little effort to do any work.
In the telling the place does sound a little Neanderthal, but my memory is that I was always cheerful, something the letters I wrote home appear to attest to. My priorities were to receive more stamps or more pocket money for balsa wood. There was news of matches: we either “sloshed” or were “sloshed by” Witham Hall. There were excuses as to why, for example, I’d scored badly in history: “I made a mistake writing about the Black Death and thinking it was the same as the Plague.” News of the weather: “We have an inch of snow, have no electricity and that means no heating or television, so it is very cold. And none of the clocks work as most of them run on electricity from the mains.” Or my veg patch: “My potatoes are coming up and going down because I cut them in half by mistake. Witham Hall sloshed us again, like my potatoes… Next week more about my potatoes.” And on one occasion about the death of a friend’s stepfather: “You might have heard about it. He was rather upset but we cheered him up and he has just about forgotten about it or doesn’t seem to really mind now.”
Meanwhile my reports make me feel more for the poor teachers. “The prospects are bleak,” wrote Mr Flower in 1979 when I was 10, adding: “Work is regarded as nothing more than idle chimera.” Mr Flower revelled in his own peculiarity but he constantly entertained us and I only realised several years later that his detailed lessons about treacle mining were a brilliant hoax. As for Mr Porch: I met with him a few years later for maths coaching at his home in Norfolk and he couldn’t have been kinder.
I see my fellow Old Maidwellians every five years or so and we revel in our shared memories and of the eccentricities of the school. But we all agree that we were happy and unaffected by any enforced cold swims, floggings or torture in the Wilderness camp.
I don’t doubt the veracity of Spencer’s bitter tale but it doesn’t mean that we also suffered nor that we are somehow brutally immune to it.
If boarding school is tough on anyone it’s the parents. Prep school pupils find themselves in an institution whose sole purpose is to entertain, educate, exercise, feed and control day in, day out.
And I hope that this year, attacked from within by Spencer and from the outside by Labour’s threat of VAT on fees, people will remember that most of us prep school boys were happy. We set traps above our dorm door for the headmaster so that books rained down on his head on entry, we spent our spare time climbing trees, and if our food was awful, it was always better than the match tea at the likes of Witham Hall, whether we were sloshed or not.
This column was first published on Feb 17
