A Very Private School

By: Charles Spencer

Narrated by: Charles Spencer

Length: 7 hrs and 57 mins

Publisher's summary

THE #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

'Shocking and moving' Guardian

'A tour-de-force' Washington Post

At eight years of age, Charles Spencer was sent away to one of England’s most exclusive boarding schools.

In this courageous and beautifully written memoir, Spencer offers a clear-eyed, first-hand account of the strange secrets of the school, and the culture of cruelty and abuse he witnessed and experienced in his five years there as a pupil.

Drawing on the memories of many of his schoolboy contemporaries, as well as his own letters and diaries from the time, the book is his attempt to come to terms with the deep emotional scars inflicted upon him. Spencer reflects on the misery, hopelessness and abandonment he felt aged eight, viscerally describing the intense pain of homesickness, the vicious brutality of a boys’ school in the 1970s and the appalling inescapability of it all.

The book cracks the code of the unpoliced regime that ran the place and provides important insights into an antiquated boarding school system. He gives vivid portraits of the teachers and other staff placed in loco parentis, their casual cruelties and toxic obsessions. All these years later, Spencer’s bafflement at their motivations to inflict such cruelty on young children is palpable. As is his fury that, even if somehow he had spoken up, he’d never have been believed.

©2024 Charles Spencer (P)2024 HarperCollins Publishers Limited

Heartache

Listening to this book made me so incredibly sad ALL the way through. I hope it healed you a little in writing it. I also hope that parents treasure their children and protect them.

Trauma & it's consequences, an excellent insight

It seems wrong to say this book is brilliant given the difficult topic it covers. However, the insight with which it is written, the language chosen, the sensitivity & fairness comes across throughout the writing. I believe that this book has the potential for a much broader audience to gain insight through reflection on how incidents in their own past could have impacted their lives & possibly open a conversation to address possible past trauma still impacted their lives today. Thank you Charles for reading this yourself, it couldn't have been easy. I know through the writing of this book for you & the reading of this book for others, change will occur.

Thank you for teaching us, sir.

I feel like parents/guardians/educators in particular should be aware of the contents of this book.