Charles Spencer’s English berserk

It looked like a Victorian madhouse from where I stood: all smoke-stained redbrick with the windows barred to discourage suicide. My mother had dressed me up in a tweed jacket and a tie, only to deposit me there outside the last-remaining all-boys prep school in the north of England. An older boy appeared and spirited me away to a new life, which only felt real once I lay on the first-night hardness of a piss-proof bed, listening to the dorm chorus of sobbing that began soon after lights out.

This would be “home” for the next five years. It was advertised as “a place where boys could be boys”, with its acres of park, valley and woodland, into which boys could disappear and beat each other with sticks and fenceposts and marinated conkers.