Prep school

Thursday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

My prep school scarred me for life

On one blissful, cloudless day during the summer holidays of 1972, Charles Spencer, who had just turned eight, surveyed the scene in his mother’s garden in Sussex. He’d spent the morning cycling and swimming, and a barbecue was being prepared. He remembers thinking: ‘This is too good to last.’ And he was right. A date he was dreading, 12 September, arrived. His father drove him the 100 miles from his house on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk to Maidwell Hall, the boarding prep school in Northamptonshire where Spencer would be a pupil for the next five years. We all remember that end-of-summer-holidays dread: the savage haircut, the putting on of itchy school uniform after months in cotton. Spencer evokes this brilliantly in his unputdownable memoir A Very Private School.

Thursday

Gilbert T. Sewall

The progressive elect comes to Brearley

From our US edition

Brearley is an all-girls day school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with a $150 million endowment and an unparalleled history of academic excellence. Its alumnae are among the most capable, accomplished and charming women on the planet. Its graduates include publisher Dorothy Schiff, arts patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and actresses Ann Baxter, Téa Leoni, and Jill Clayburgh. The list of Brearley’s serious, soignée women is long. Legendary English instructor Frances Taliaferro was an essayist and book reviewer for Harper’s magazine. Head Priscilla Winn Barlow ranks among the great educators of her generation. The place has always had a dash of marching suffragette and limousine liberal, but hey, this is Gotham, not Grover’s Corners.

Thursday

Aidan Hartley

Back to Exmoor, scene of prep-school rides on rough ponies

Exmoor I am heading to Exmoor for the first time since I was last there in 1977 — and as the train pulls into Tiverton Parkway station my childhood rises back up at me like ground rush. We head north and pass Ravenswood, the gothic building where I spent six years of my life when it was still a prep school. And suddenly I am back on the same road we’d take on Thursdays, in a van heading up to a farm on the moor’s edge. Back then, 43 years ago, a shaggy-haired farmer’s boy called Kevin would lead us out hacking on rough ponies across the heather and marshes. In winter months, mists and rain hugged the pagan landscape, and even in summer, curtains of cloud swept across the gorse and granite.