Overture

      In May of 1963, when I was nine, Miss Vera Groom, the old spinster who taught me English, asked her class to name a noun beginning with a vowel. There was a new word that I was proud of knowing. I had discovered it from the cook’s Daily Express. I raised my hand, and in response to a nod from her cried out ‘Orgy!’ Miss Groom trembled: she gripped the edge of her desk; her face flushed with blood; her skin turned puce. ‘You are a foul boy,’ she said, and sent me to be caned by the headmaster.

      A few days later Mr Wilcox addressed the school. It was the year Dr No sold 437,000 copies in paperback. Warner Wilcox was then in his early forties, but seemed old to me. Like many headmasters of his time, he was both overbearing and anxious. Dark-browed, stern, conscientious, he had a jolly wife who could not soothe his pent-up tension. When he rebuked his school, he would spring up and down on his heels, as if he was going to bound forward into the boys and start cuffing them. ‘It has come to my attention,’ he said in a storm of tense heel-jerks, ‘that boys are bringing James Bond novels into school. I will not have them on the premises. They are sad-is-tic novels’ – he pronounced each syllable of sadistic lingeringly before ending his speech with a savage roar – ‘and I will thrash any boy who is found in possession of one.’ As soon as I could, I asked a chauffeur what ‘sadistic’ meant. If he knew, he did not say.

      Then in June came prize-giving – ten days after John Profumo’s resignation as War Minister, I estimate, and two days before the momentous House of Commons debate on that resignation. The prizes were distributed, and a rousing speech was made by a friend of Wilcox called Renée Soskin. Mrs Soskin was a mother of six. She ran both a farm in Bedfordshire and an import-export business, which she had inherited when her husband died during his morning press-ups a year earlier. Her sister was political editor of the Observer, the Sunday newspaper for progressives, and Mrs Soskin, a humane, plucky, helpful woman, was Liberal parliamentary candidate at the 1964 general election for that most high-minded London suburb, Hampstead. She had, indeed, appeared on television promoting Liberal policies for the family, in a party political broadcast for the 1959 general election. A Conservative columnist had called her ‘a most intelligent and remarkable lady almost capable of converting me to Liberalism’.¹

      From the prize-giving podium Renée Soskin praised Mr Wilcox, Mr Potts, Mr Lorimer-Thomas (little did she know about Mr Lorimer-Thomas) while I daydreamed. Then she began to praise fee-paying schools, and I was jolted to attention. ‘Private schools are more indispensable than ever,’ she thundered at the climax of her peroration, ‘at this time of Deplorable Breakdown of Public Morals.’ The phrase rattled round the hall: ‘Deplorable Breakdown of Public Morals’. The adults rustled and