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
SARAH VINE: When one thinks of Charles Spencer, 9th Earl Spencer, brother to the late Princess Diana, one tends to assume a life of unalloyed privilege but what he experienced is inconceivable.
In an extract from his powerful memoir published exclusively in The Mail on Sunday, Earl Spencer describes in devastating detail the sexual assaults and beatings he suffered at Maidwell Hall.