PRINCESS Diana’s brother Charles has announced he is to divorce for the third time. Earl Spencer hasn’t given the reasons (there’s rarely just one) behind the split from Canadian philanthropist Karen Gordon , but it’s fair to assume that writing a memoir about the physical and sexual abuse he suffered at boarding school might have played its part. Particularly as it led to him undergoing residential treatment for psychological trauma towards the end of last year.
In his book, A Very Private School, he reveals he was regularly beaten by male teachers at Maidwell Hall prep school in Northamptonshire and sexually abused by a predatory assistant matron who he didn’t identify. He was 11, she was around 20 and, he claims, she routinely groomed and abused him and other boys after lights out. Now another man who attended the school has come forward to corroborate Charles’s recollections and says he too was abused by her.
“She used to sleep with some boys and then she did, I guess, sexual favours to others,” he says. He reveals he has previously made light of what happened, but since reading the memoir he now realises that what she did was “clearly wrong”. I’ll say.
Yet there is still a tendency for people to view the older woman/young boy sexual experience from a “lucky him” perspective. Indeed, when I raised the subject at a dinner with friends the other night, that was the exact response. “And how would you feel about it if it was a male teacher routinel.
