Flannelled Fool by TC Worsley (1967)

This is a plainly written early autobiography, remarkable for its discussion of homosexuality in the context of British public schools, both as a student and a teacher. Worsley's father was an extraordinary man, an athlete and womaniser who was one of those never-quite-satisfied types, always pushing for more, or for something different. The astonishing thing, given this personality profile, is that his early life was spent, on the whole most successfully, in the church! His charm is the probable reason; he was seen as an asset for reasons other than those of belief. The effect on his children, and particularly the author, of this testy, niggled, distant person was pretty numbing. Then the inevitable explosion of boredom and wrongdoing occurred and all the family's lives were turned upside down. He left, disgraced in the church, and was not much seen by them again. Worsley also recounts his time at school, echoing his father in terms of athletic prowess, and very slowly, with painful innocence and childishness, discovering his true nature of preferring males sexually. Though the substance of this material is not new, it is still fascinating and welcomely plainly put. He moves on to Cambridge, and thence to a junior mastership at a public school. There he causes a stir among the more traditional types by advocating modern types of tutorship, teaching and house-mastering. Supported by the more liberal members of staff and bolstered by a head who is sufficiently diplomatic to work around all the combatants' foibles, he achieves headway in some issues alongside some notable defeats. This part of the text highlights a minor issue for me, which is one of the suspicion of re-creation of events in re-ordered form to serve the purposes of drama. Thus two masters who are fighting catch one another at the same time trotting up to the head's office to blab, and both do a peculiar choreographed little curlicue and head off sheepishly in different directions. In another instance, the head returns a copy of a disputed Lawrence novel to Worsley on a silver salver with a pithy note attached. All too artfully convenient for my liking - he openly admits to the wish to alter events to make a more dramatically appealing narrative at another point. Otherwise, though, there is an admirable self-critical candour in this book. He's quite happy to admit to feeling profound interest in some of the better-looking or more seemingly needy young men at the school. Some of this will be a little difficult to read for some, but I think most of what he says has a refreshing honesty about it which can only help to make clear how filaments of emotion and longing can reverberate in these hothouse circumstances. So,with its portrait of the young post-war generation discovering the modern in their dislocated world, of the developing consciousness of left-wing politics that was prevalent in the 1920s and 1930s, this narrative also openly depicts taboo subjects with engaging simplicity.