Glennings

Glennings is a co-educational boarding school in West Sussex whose emphasis on creative freedom sets it apart from the rigid institutions Charlie Treadaway has known. Edwina Treadaway chooses it after Charlie leaves Wyebourne College, hoping for a more artistic environment. At Glennings, pupils are encouraged to follow their interests and experiment rather than submit to a conventional curriculum; for Charlie, that freedom is both a release and an invitation to fashion himself on his own terms.

Setting and educational ethos

Only ten years old when Edwina visits, Glennings presents itself as an alternative to traditional boarding-school discipline. Its deputy head describes an education organized around pupils’ interests and self-direction. The grounds include allotments, while an outbuilding houses small animals such as rabbits and guinea pigs. Charlie has no interest in keeping a pet: he regards their feeding, cleaning and care as a commitment he does not want. Rowena, by contrast, is the sibling interested in animals. Even this small difference reflects how little Glennings’ offerings prescribe a single kind of childhood.

Dickie Spinner objects to the school before seeing it. He believes a mixed boarding school will distract boys from sport and lead girls astray; Edwina counters that Charlie dislikes sport and that Glennings does not make athletic conformity a priority. Their disagreement makes the transfer more than a change of address. Where Dickie values established rules and conventional preparation, Edwina looks for a setting in which Charlie’s interests need not be treated as defects.

The school’s ethos is deliberately permissive. Pupils can pursue subjects that engage them, and the environment gives them room and equipment to experiment. There is no uniform, and sixth-formers are allowed to smoke on the premises. After the cassocks and starched white ruffs of Westminster Abbey Choir School, followed by the strict appearance checks at Wyebourne, Charlie experiences the absence of dress rules as a striking liberation.

Charlie’s reinvention and art

At Glennings, Charlie assembles a conspicuously theatrical appearance from charity-shop clothes: pinstriped waistcoats, paisley cravats and, for a time, a battered top hat. At fifteen, he has the ends of his black curls bleached blonde by a girl in his year; whether they are sleeping together remains uncertain. Later, he wears an original 1930s mess jacket decorated with medals. His style makes visible the self-invention that the school’s loose rules permit, and contrasts with the conventional uniforms worn by Rowena and Lucas Spinner at their schools.

That contrast is especially sharp beside Lucas’s elaborate public-school wardrobe. Lucas is expected to change for different occasions, from everyday wear to church, formal dining, tennis, rugby and fencing; at thirteen, he must manage a bow tie and cufflinks. Charlie, by contrast, is prepared for neither the life of a gentleman nor a defined conventional career. At Glennings he can look, in his family’s eyes, like a vagabond or a performer. The school does not simply loosen his clothing; it leaves open what kind of future he might claim.

Glennings has no formal art teaching or conventional anatomy instruction. Sometimes pupils take off their clothes and draw one another, laughing as they do so. The school’s contribution is instead space, equipment and permission to try things without being told to conserve paper or avoid glitter. Charlie’s work becomes confident and flamboyant, including enormous canvases sprayed with metallic car paint. Edwina admires his energy but questions whether the showy effects amount to skill. The novel thus distinguishes the freedom to make art from any guarantee of artistic accomplishment.

An A in O-level art, the only A Charlie earns, gives him a direction. He decides he will go to art school, imagining it as a route not only to becoming an artist but perhaps to joining a band, as he associates art-school backgrounds with pop stars. Glennings has not supplied a formal artistic discipline; it has provided the room in which Charlie can turn one success into an ambition.

The school’s place in the abuse scandal

Charlie’s move to Glennings follows his departure from Wyebourne, where he had been abused by Robbins, a person in a position of care. Edwina later realizes that Dickie had helped secure Charlie’s place at Wyebourne while knowing what Robbins was capable of; the school accepted Charlie in order to keep Dickie from exposing what it knew. This history belongs to Wyebourne, not Glennings, but it shapes the circumstances that bring Charlie to his next school. Afterward, his school trunk receives a new address label, a small material sign of a life redirected after institutional failure.

When Charlie’s later drug case draws press attention, Glennings is pulled back into public view as part of his school history. Newspapers contrast Edwina’s children’s illustrations with the scandal and revisit Charlie’s time at Wyebourne. Glennings’ spokesperson describes Charlie as a much-loved member of its school community and presents drugs as a modern scourge from which not everyone emerges unscathed. The statement offers an image of care and belonging, but also frames his drug problems as a wider social affliction rather than dwelling on the specific circumstances of his life.

Narrative significance

Glennings functions as a counterpoint to Wyebourne’s concealed abuse and to the strict institutions that precede it. Its permissiveness gives Charlie room to reject uniform, sport and conventional study, while allowing his artistic ambition to take shape. Yet freedom is not the same as protection or direction: his flamboyant work is judged uncertain in quality, and the school’s later public defense of him cannot undo the destructive events that make his past newsworthy. Glennings therefore marks a real opening in Charlie’s life, but not a simple rescue. It makes space for reinvention without determining what that reinvention will become.