Review of The Loom of Youth

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The Loom of Youth
by Alec Waugh, published 1917
Adolescence is the most intense period of our lives. As we enter adulthood, our bodies and minds bursting into flower, the world throws itself open to us. We are overwhelmed by sensations, by thoughts, by possibilities. Freedom beckons, although we do not understand what freedom means and we do not know if we are capable of pursuing it. We flee from our parents' stifling embrace into the company of our peers, thinking they know everything and unaware they are as ignorant as ourselves.

Most teenagers have three environments in which to explore and the world around them - home, school and the wider world - but throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the children of the British elite had only one option: the Public (ie private, expensive) School. For thirty-six weeks of the year there was no escape from its hothouse atmosphere. As I experienced during my years as a public schoolboy in the late 1960s, our lives, our personalities, our outlook on life, our attitudes towards sex, our confidence in ourselves, were determined primarily by the 60 other 13 - 18 year-olds who lived in our single-sex house, secondarily by the 400 other boys in the school and lastly by the masters who taught us.

Alec Waugh, brother of the better-known Evelyn, wrote The Loom of Youth when he was seventeen, a pupil at Sherborne School in Dorset, south-west England. It tells the story of Gordon Caruthers, from his first day 13 year old at the fictional Fernhurst to the day he leaves four years later, charting the boy's development from diffidence to arrogance, from the lowest rung of the school's social ladder to near its peak. Apart from one reference on the second page, to the mother and father who return home by the afternoon train, there is no reference to anything in Gordon's life outwith his school.

Which, for those who have been through that particular fire, is as it should be. Because while you are at School, at least until the outbreak of war, the rest of the world does not exist, except perhaps in the lines of ancient Greek and Latin that once made up the core of the Public School timetable. All that is important is one's reputation, one's friends, one's ability at rugger and cricket, one's ability to both be part of the system and yet to break through it.

The Public School novel was a staple of children's reading in Britain for almost a hundred years, covering both comedy (the Billy Bunter series) and drama (Angela Brazil's stories of stout-hearted gels). There were fewer titles for adults, however, which partly explains the success of Waugh's novel, which went through seven print runs in its first year.

But only partly. Waugh's novel was popular because it captured perfectly the turbulence of Gordon's youth, class and time - and because it bridged the moment between the seemingly perfect peace of the Edwardian years and the horrors of the First World War, when young men of Gordon's background went to fight in a glorious adventure and died in their thousands in mud and terror and agony.

In those four years Gordon experiences conformity and rebellion, friendship and enmity, enthusiasm and disdain. He begins, as all

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Fernhurst men do, by worshipping athletics and despising study, and ends by respecting exercise of both body and mind. He enters school only dimly aware of the shadow it will throw over him and leaves it "well equipped and fortified 'for the long littleness of life'."

Then there is, as there is in the lives of all adolescents, sex and love. It is not the central topic of the novel, but where he covers the subject Waugh is, for his time, revolutionary. He writes obliquely, about sex between boys, openly, about love for a boy and, coyly about an evening spent with a girl. The girl appears once. The love is the subject of a single chapter, and the sex comes up three or four times.

In Waugh's eyes, sex and love are very different. Here is his description of the two:

He [Gordon] only knew that when he was with Morcombe he was indescribably happy. There was something in him [Morcombe] so natural, so unaffected, so sensitive to beauty. After this, Morcombe came up to Gordon's study nearly every evening, and usually Foster left them alone together, and went off in search of Collins.

Indeed this friendship ... was all that kept Gordon from wild ecesses during the dark December days and the drear opening weeks of the Easter term. During the long morning hours, when Gordon was supposed to be reading history, more than once there came over him a wish to plunge himself into the feverish waters of pleasure, and forget for a while the doubts and disappointments that overhung everything in his life. At times he would sit in the big window-seat, when the school was changing class-rooms and as he saw the sea of faces of those, some big, some small, who had drifted with the stream, and had soon forgotten early resolutions and principles in the conveniently broadminded atmosphere of a certain side Public School life, he realised how easily he could slip into that life and be engulfed. No one would mind; his position would be the same; no one would think worse of him. Unless, of course, he was caught. Then probably everyone would turn round upon him; that was the one unforgivable sin - to be found out. But it was rarely that anyone was caught; and the descent was so easy. In his excitement he might perhaps forget a little.

In fact, Waugh himself has forgotten that Gordon himself indulged in such pleasure earlier in the book and his best friend was expelled for the sin of being caught. No matter. This is fiction and mood trumps accuracy.

My copy of the The Loom of Youth dates back to 1941. It has, however, been republished, almost 100 years after it first appeared. Buy it for the glimpse of a world that has long since gone but which still echoes in the lives of adolescents everywhere.

December 2008

For another view of British public school life, fifty years later and with much greater sexual obsession, see Michael Campbell's Lord Dismiss Us, reviewed here.

Fiction by Martin Foreman

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