A Bit Rough C YNICAL, tired-out parents and squalid homes are
Often responsible for unhappiness and delinquency in children: the same must often be true of cynical, tired-out teachers and squalid schools. J,ehn Townsend has taught at a couple of such 1-ondon secondary moderns and recounts in lively, if rather slapdash, prose what it is like tO be responsible for a gang of hooligans who sPit—and worse—on the classroom floor, or a bunch of near-tarts, heavily made up and every minute of fifteen. No doubt public- school masters have their problems, too, but these Must seldom include boys who speculatively eye the school's plumbing because of the 'high price of lead. Much of Mr. Townsend's book is quite funny, but it also prompts the question, how to Make the State's educational system attractive to the teacher so that it can be adequate for the taught. A child is 'deprived,' in the same way, if not to the same degree, as if his mother leaves
When he asks the new teacher, as one asked
Townsend, 'Are you goin' to stay wiv us, sir?, No one never stays Wiv us.' Robert Hutton was born to elderly and sur- prised middle-class parents, and suffered an inter- rupted schooling, which may have had something to do with his growing up into 'an alcoholic and a homosexual.' Now that he is almost seventy, he exPlains in his moving and useful book, age has lifted one burden from him, and Alcoholics Anonymous the other. He is matter-of-fact and sometimes amusing, but the chief value of his book is that it shows how a sex-life that is forced to be both clandestine and promiscuous•is enough
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