The beatings were brutal and sadistic… many of us left school with demons sewn into the seams of our souls, says EARL SPENCER

The director of Maidwell, John Porch – who we called Jack – enjoyed hitting us with a slipper for the most trivial of infractions, such as talking after the lights were out.

Shortly after arriving I learned that the school has never had a victimless day. After tea, at least six of us disappeared into the dimly lit hallway that led to Jack’s study.

As you stood outside, the sound of Jack’s blows came through the closed door, like a terrible warning of what you were about to suffer. Stomachs gurgled, throats dried, and buttocks tensed as fear tightened its grip.

One of my friends was so upset that he lost control of both his bladder and stomach. Hearing this, Jack stormed out of his study and asked, “What’s going on?”

The child replied, “I spilled something, sir.”

“Wet yourself, better!” Jack seethed. “You grubby little boy!”, before angrily sending him back out into the hallway to clean himself up.

When the time finally came, you were led forward by the deputy head boy. As you shuffle into the gloomy study, your eyes adjust and you see Jack sitting there, devoid of compassion, ready to inflict physical pain.

He listened with obvious disappointment as your offense was read out by the head boy, after which he made a brief indictment of your behavior before tossing a slipper from one foot to the other and beckoning you towards him.

He was an expert at the next part, pulling you down so that your stomach turned on his skinny knees before raising the vent of your jacket so he could aim unobstructed at your bottom.

The blows were delivered quickly and sharply, with the full force of his sinewy arm, before he pushed you away in disgust. You walked to the door of the study, your head swimming in shock and pain, biting your lip and blinking hard.

If the schoolboy’s transgression extended beyond the headmaster’s slipper, there were two canes, so famous they had been given their own names: ‘The Flick’ and ‘The Swish’.

The head boy would be told to leave the room. Jack told the student to drop his pants and underwear before delivering the strokes in private.

The Flick was a thin, vicious instrument delivered with such force that it ripped a pistol and cut the skin, causing blood to ooze from tight lines.

For particularly serious misdeeds, he turned to The Swish – a sturdier, knotted piece that packed a bigger punch.

When he was in the mood for something more exotic than these two old faithfuls, the principal would saunter to the edge of the school’s lake and use a pocket knife to cut down a bamboo stem that he would use as a “one-off.” on a specific victim.

A Maidwell friend of mine, who died a few years ago, told how Jack reached his hand towards the boy’s scrotum during a caning in the study.

Another former student told me how, while he was being caned, he noticed a large bulge in the front of Jack’s cavalry twill. The director gave this boy a hard slap in the face and shouted, ‘How dare you turn around? Look forward!’, before completing the beating with extra force.

One of my Maidwell colleagues was called to the investigation with a student who had felled a sapling on the school grounds. “He caned (the other boy) in front of me. It was so hard.’

He then turned to my friend and slapped his buttocks so violently that the cotton of his underwear became tangled in his torn flesh as the blood dried. My friend was only able to separate his clothes from his cuts that evening after the matron soaked him in the bath and the underwear came free from his wounds.

Jack’s main accomplice was the Latin master, the Honorable Henry Cornwallis Maude, a cruel sadist with a powder-keg temper. Later in life he became High Sheriff of Kent.

His habit was to throw chalk and blackboard markers at us during class. He also hit us hard about the head and yanked our ear as he twisted it around, enjoying the screams of anguished protest.

While prowling around the classroom during a Latin test, one of my contemporaries, Thomas Scott, tried to hide his paper. He was hit on the head from behind and fell unconscious on his desk.

Outside the classroom, Maude was in charge of swimming. On Sunday morning he took the best swimmers among the older boys for a secret skinny dip.

As we prepubescents took off our underwear, Maude did the same, his member springing up in anticipation. One of my best friends wasn’t allowed into the water except through what the master called “the human slide.” This was Maude, naked, leaning against a tree, with an erection.

My main memory of him involves an unprovoked attack when I was ten or eleven.

When he caught me alone in the boys’ boot room after a cricket match, he sat down next to me, threw me over his knees and hit me hard with one of my cricket boots, the metal spikes piercing the skin of my buttocks in a dozen places . .

Adult anger seemed to burn like an eternal flame at Maidwell. Another master, Thomas Goffe, was a seething human cauldron who had a deep-seated aversion to privilege. Because many of Maidwell’s pupils were descendants of aristocrats, landowners and of the great English banking, brewing and manufacturing dynasties, his normal situation was at a boiling point.

He particularly hated me and would lash out during class, hitting me on the head with his broad, hairy hands, causing me to stagger with dizziness and pain.

On several occasions, he deliberately rolled his hand over at the last minute, causing his thick signet ring to slice open my scalp. He got away with this because I had a thick matte of red hair, and my blood clotted in the roots before drying invisibly there.

What were these men thinking, I now wonder, as they exerted all their adult power against defenseless prepubescents?

When I recently told a former Maidwell contemporary that I had been sexually assaulted at Maidwell, he immediately named the staff member responsible. “I always knew it,” he said. ‘But how?’ I answered. We had been friendly as boys, but because we had been in a strictly hierarchical place in different years, we were never confidants.

‘I just did it. It was clear.’

To my horror, he told me that at the age of nine he had been sexually abused three times in Maidwell by someone who was supposed to protect him. His attacker threatened him with terrible retaliation if he ever told anyone about it.

His main memory of Maidwell, he told me, was feeling worthless every day of his five years there.

He was severely bullied, especially by the director: “I was terrified of him,” he says. ‘He took me to a place within myself where I didn’t want to go.

‘I never got over it. I have no anger, I don’t want justice – whatever that is – but I do know that my life never had a chance after being so deeply scarred by that school.’

Since then I have had several similar reunions with Maidwell contemporaries who suffered terribly.

“Tell me,” I asked one of them, “when you think of the school, what is the one word that comes to mind – the one that really sums up the place?”

He stopped and stared into the distance before stepping onto the label to write down memories of his five Maidwell years: “Fear,” he said. He snorted, embarrassed in the English way that he had revealed something that could be seen as a weakness or a failure.

I pushed him: ‘And what was the basis of that fear?’

He sniffed again.

“Waiting to be defeated again for God knows what.” He blinked hard, a successful sixty year old man suddenly reconnecting with the vulnerable boy he had been, caught in the tendrils of overwhelming sadistic rituals.

I have often witnessed deep pain still flickering in the eyes of my Maidwell contemporaries.

The root of that pain is that we are not cherished, encouraged or appreciated, as we might have been at home, but belittled, berated, beaten and – if we were lucky – merely tolerated.

Others appear to have remained intact. But many of us left Maidwell with demons sewn into the seams of our souls.

My innocence stolen, I lost my virginity at the age of 12 to an Italian prostitute

MEN who learn what Assistant Matron Please did to me at Maidwell tend initially to give me a boyish thumbs-up: ‘Lucky!’ they say.

“Would you say that if the genders were reversed?” I ask. “You know, if it was a 20-year-old man sexually assaulting an 11-year-old girl?”

Then they understand.

The effect of what she did on me was profound and immediate, awakening desires in me that had no place in someone so young. I had felt a vagina when my friends longed for a first kiss, and I had been sensually touched during those long, passionate embraces. And, to my shame, it felt good.

You can’t put the genie back in the bottle, as the cliché goes, and this child abuse meant that I wanted full-on sex from an early age.

The assistant matron had given me a taste, and I wanted the extra portion she had promised me, but she had held back. I lost my virginity at the age of 12, driven by compulsion.

Late at night, during a trip to Italy with my mother and stepfather, I looked from my bedroom window into the square below and saw a lady wearing short skirts standing in the corner under a street lamp. My stepfather had noticed her when we came back from dinner and whispered “una prostituta” to my mother, and she had nodded.

Shortly afterwards I walked down the stairs and slipped out of the boarding house without a word.

‘Quanto costa?’ I asked, using words I’d heard my mother say when she opened the negotiation for a handbag earlier in the day.

“Trenta mille lira,” she replied.

She led me to a room, which, like The Uppers, was in an attic. When it was about to happen, I said, “I don’t know what to do,” and she looked at me blankly, not understanding English.

After another pause, I quietly and firmly let the woman take the lead. It was a dynamic that felt familiar.

There was no joy in the act, no sense of arrival, no coming of age.

I now believe that I was simply completing the process set in motion by the assistant matron’s perverse attention.

Afterwards I felt hollow and cold. I didn’t sleep with a woman for five years, until I was 17 and my girlfriend was 18.

• Excerpted from Charles Spencer’s A Very Private School, which will be published by HarperCollins on March 14 for £25. To order a copy for €22.50, go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Offer valid until April 18; UK postage free on orders over £25