(according to Robert Graves) said: "My boys are amorous, but seldom erotic." Few people who express themselves on this subject give any details. I should like to try and remedy this by saying something about what happened at the boarding school where I was educated from 1945 to 1952. I can vouch for the facts I give, but the generalisations and conclusions are my own. My experiences are not the whole story, though what I have heard about other schools confirms the same in mine. But although the broad pattern is probably much the same in most places, remember that the variations from year to year and from school to school can be considerable.

My school was a fairly new one in the West Country with about 100 boys between the ages of 10 and 19, up to 30 of them in the Sixth Form. A third of them have scholarships from schools in the county and come from all classes; the rest pay fees (about average) and have largely middle-class and professional parents. The school. on the one hand is modelled on a normal public school and on the other hand progressive tendencies-relative informality outside school hours, sympathetic treatment of problems, and boys' assemblies. It caters for difficult boys and has some success with them. It has an excellent academic record and is fairly good at games.

In such a school nearly all activity takes place in the school environment. We were allowed to visit the local towns pretty freely, but few of us had enough money to make it worth while. In our free time we could work or read, play games, play musical instruments or the communal gramophone, do art or carpentry, walk or cycle, or just loaf and talk. There were outings to concerts and theatres, school plays, and weekly dances (about a dozen females present, mostly masters' wives or women staff). Plenty of variety, it is true, but all in a confined atmosphere-rather like that of a kibbutz, I should think. Classes were seldom larger than 20 and averaged about 12; after a couple of years we all knew each other far too well.

mattachine REVIEW

We had scarcely any relations at all with girls during term-time, though some of us (mostly the scholarship boys) had girl-friends at home and corresponded with them. The local village was tiny, few masters had eligible daughters, the school maids were small in number 'and usually deficient in attraction (but were nevertheless much pursued). But, as is now generally known, active sexual life begins for boys at puberty (which seems to get earlier and earlier) and the peak of potency occurs at about 16-18. Masturbation was all but universal and was frequent: every other day was considered normal. Few people ever denied masturbating, but it was scarcely discussed or even mentioned, except in jokes or insults. The headmaster sometimes asked us about it, but never tried to stop it or even discourage it.

The only form of shared sexual activity for most of us was homosexual. Here I should say that as far as I know there were no physical relations between boys and masters. Though most of the unmarried resident masters were to some extent homosexual and often paid attention to certain boys, entertaining them in their rooms or out of school (sometimes even touching them in a minor way), there was no real scandal during my time. Curiously enough, we did not connect homosexuality among ourselves with the behaviour of the masters: we considered them to be abnormal, despite the fact that we did freely what they would presumably have liked to do. At the same time they were the chief opponents of boy offenders--a common phenomenon, I am sure (cf. Montherlant's 'La Ville dont le Prince est un Enfant', a play about a Catholic boys' school in Paris based. it seems. on the author's experiences).

Among the boys themselves homosexual activity was widespread. Lest this should sound too vague, I will give figures. Altogether, about 200 boys were there with me. Omitting about 50 who were either too old or too young for me to know at all well, I can state that of the remaining 150 at least 80 were to my certain know-