A Very Private School Quotes

“All these experiences we have through our days make us who we are: hardy, tough, resilient, determined,” while recognizing they’ve also left us “wary, untrusting and emotionally retarded/unstable.”
― Charles Spencer, A Very Private School: A Memoir

“two defenses: First, that they were only doing the same as everyone else from their social background; and, second, that they thought their sons would become all the stronger, for having survived their ordeal.”
― Charles Spencer, A Very Private School: A Memoir

“If the white men and women of the British Empire are idle, soft, selfish, hysterical and undisciplined,” he asked, “are they likely to rule well?” To be effective in their imperial roles, the sons of the empire needed to have the instinct of pining for home snuffed out, early and forever. The tightly wound “Brit” of caricature often had his stiff”
― Charles Spencer, A Very Private School: A Memoir

“Anthony Stapley—who sank to the bottom of the school’s swimming pool through Maude’s cruelty, and who Jack whipped so hard he bore the scars on his buttocks into middle age—sees the legacy of his Maidwell years as twofold: “All these experiences we have through our days make us who we are: hardy, tough, resilient, determined,” while recognizing they’ve also left us “wary, untrusting and emotionally retarded/unstable.”
― Charles Spencer, A Very Private School: A Memoir

“I remembered John as far from robust—before joining the school, his fragile legs had required medical support. He also faced learning difficulties, which this typically unevolved 1970s boarding school failed to address. His Maidwell years would have been challenging anyway; but they were made hellish by the likes of Goffie. John was a sensitive and thoroughly decent boy who was tormented by this shameless, cowardly bully, in a school regime that had a hundred rules, but not one of them proved capable of protecting the most vulnerable in its ranks. What on earth would persuade Goffie—a man, powerful in physique and status—to pick on someone so fragile and defenseless? As his younger brother recalled in the eulogy that he gave at John’s funeral: At Maidwell John had a tough time, principally because he had dyslexia which was not diagnosed for several years, until age ten. Some bullying teachers accused him of not trying, or of being lazy, neither of which was true. Looking back, John always noted Mr. Goffe as the worst offender, a mean teacher who regularly hit his knuckles with a wooden ruler. These constant knockdowns in turn affected John’s self-confidence, and he became very shy. But John was always sweet and kind with other boys, never passing on the knocks that were handed out to him. Aged eleven, John was moved to a school specializing in dyslexia. But three years at Maidwell, being bullied by the likes of Goffie, had changed him. The self-assurance that he’d had as a young boy, before being sent away, was bled out of him. After school he lived the quietest of lives. In adulthood he had no romantic partner or close friends, preferring to sit at home by himself, watching television. His family background was immensely privileged, but he took humble jobs—helping in a pet store, then a home supplies warehouse—surprising colleagues at the latter by walking to work on a day when the roads were so clogged with snow that none of them, or any of their customers, made it in. John died from an intestinal disorder that he had ignored: His family believes that he had lost the instinct for self-care, had failed to get himself to a doctor, and this killed him. He was found dead after failing to turn up for work. I had not appreciated that the weight of suffering experienced by many of my contemporaries would be so virulent, and so hard to bear. When I read John’s eulogy, I cried with pity, and then rage.”
― Charles Spencer, A Very Private School: A Memoir

“It followed eight-year-olds as they are sent away, giving them a voice, and hearing from their mothers and fathers. Some of the parents were astonishingly callous (a father dismissing the concept of speaking to an eight-year-old son on the phone as absurd—“they can’t express themselves very well”;”
― Charles Spencer, A Very Private School: A Memoir

“While some parents chose to ignore the evidence before them, others were delighted to be spared what they saw as the grind of child-rearing. Jack told one of his junior masters that quite a few of those sending their boys to Maidwell “put their horses first, then their dogs—and, after both, they place their children.” These people found their offspring’s need for nurturing a dull distraction from life’s enjoyment.”
― Charles Spencer, A Very Private School: A Memoir

“Two of my contemporaries had such distant relationships with their respective fathers that they recall having physical contact with them on only one occasion, each. The first received an encouraging handshake when being left on his first day as an eight-year-old new boy. The other had to wait till his fifties, when his elderly father suddenly reached out a hand for comfort, hours before death.”
― Charles Spencer, A Very Private School: A Memoir

“For those of us desperately missing our pets at home—my letters to my mother often led with “How are all the animals?”—we loved hearing Johnno talk about his cat, Mugwump. We never met Mugwump, since the Johnsons lived in a cottage in the village that was out of bounds, but we warmed to tales of this cat’s boundless gluttony and laziness—delicious snippets of domestic life that briefly transported us far from our regimented existence. From the few interactions we had with Mrs. Johnson, when she popped by to drop off something for her husband, we knew she was quietly kind. I liked to imagine that Mugwump had a pretty fun life, his food bowl chock-full of treats.”
― Charles Spencer, A Very Private School: A Memoir

“After breakfast we had to go to the bathroom. Granny Ford made the junior boys form a line along the wall outside the loo next to her dispensary. She asked each on exiting: “Did you go—properly?” and if your answer was “Yes, Please,” she penciled a tick against your name in her small notebook. Repeated failure to deliver resulted in a course of laxatives.”
― Charles Spencer, A Very Private School: A Memoir

“My father had taught me a general kicking-off point for personal letters: “I hope you are well, and having nice weather?” It was typically English in its restraint—a gentle opening, with a wry, sympathetic nod to the nation’s disheartening climate.”
― Charles Spencer, A Very Private School: A Memoir

“An older friend of mine, educated in the sixties at a boarding establishment much like Maidwell, remembers being forced to join other boys in a joyless afternoon walk in the grounds, supervised by a master feared for his bullying. “At that moment,” my friend recalls, “a car swung into the drive and out stepped a glamorous American lady, mother of one of our contemporaries. As his parents lived abroad, he never went out on exeats.I His mother stepped up to the master and said she would like to take her son out for the afternoon, only to be told this was not possible as this wasn’t an exeat Sunday. With that she simply slapped him across his face (I shall never forget the sound), took her son with her and neither of them were ever seen again.”
― Charles Spencer, A Very Private School: A Memoir

“The bachelor war hero proved something of an enigma, enthusiastically introducing his boys to boxing, while also trying to instill in them a love of plants and flower-arranging. Many of his Maidwell charges went on to the most famous of English senior schools, mainly Eton or Winchester. Meanwhile, in the gardens, he grew dwarf bulbs and lilies, and introduced a new species of snowdrop, still flourishing today, called “Maidwell.”
― Charles Spencer, A Very Private School: A Memoir

“Homesickness is a horror that great writers have described with brilliance. George Orwell remembered it as “the horrible sensation of tears—a swelling in the breast, a tickling behind the nose.” Roald Dahl reckoned that “homesickness is a bit like seasickness. You don’t know how awful it is till you get it, and when you do, it hits you right in the top of the stomach and you want to die.”
― Charles Spencer, A Very Private School: A Memoir

“Childhood is a very, very tricky business of surviving it. Because if one thing goes wrong or anything goes wrong, and usually something goes wrong, then you are compromised as a human being. You’re going to trip over that for a good part of your life. —Maurice Sendak”
― Charles Spencer, A Very Private School: A Memoir

“In the century and a half before I started at Maidwell, the ailing British upper classes—hit by increased taxation, while their traditional, agricultural incomes were strangled by cheap wheat and meat imports from the Americas—surrendered power and influence to the wealthier element of the middle classes. The two social blocs intermingled, trading in status and cash, with boarding schools forming an essential staging post for the children of the socially ambitious. George OrwellII wrote, in an essay of 1941, of how the aristocracy, rather than accepting its time had passed, “simply intermarried with the merchants, manufacturers and financiers who had replaced them, and soon turned them into accurate copies of themselves. The wealthy ship owner or cotton miller set up for himself an alibi as a country gentleman, while his sons learnt the right mannerisms at public schoolsIII—which had been designed for just that purpose.”
― Charles Spencer, A Very Private School: A Memoir

“To be effective in their imperial roles, the sons of the empire needed to have the instinct of pining for home snuffed out, early and forever. The tightly wound “Brit” of caricature often had his stiff upper lip cast in the furnace of English boarding school life, where his emotions were cauterized. The resultant, desensitized functionary could be reliably deployed far from home—whether in Calcutta, Cape Town or Calgary.”
― Charles Spencer, A Very Private School: A Memoir

“Lord Curzon, a former viceroy of India, told the Imperial Press Conference at Oxford, in 1908, “We train here, and we send out to you, your governors and administrators, and judges, your teachers, and preachers and lawyers.” This was a process rounded off at university, but it began with little boys being deposited at the hundreds of boarding schools that dotted England.”
― Charles Spencer, A Very Private School: A Memoir

“The upper echelons of English society have long subjected their sons and daughters to the forced abandonment of boarding school. Such exile from home has been seen as a worthwhile sacrifice: In return for a broken heart, the discarded child was launched down a narrow chute that ended in the soft landing of an adulthood where privilege and power lay all around them.”
― Charles Spencer, A Very Private School: A Memoir