Sometimes, with all his uncertainties and outrageous misjudgements, he felt like a man destined to stagger through life weighed down by half a dozen heavy, free-swinging slop buckets.
(His Lordship, page 23)

‘It just seems to me that half the jokes in the world are on me. I’m always the one with his trousers down.’
(William Bridgemont Herbert expressing his loser complex, p.89)

‘I don’t know how any man can look so great and be so soft, so stupid.’
(Connie the American schoolgirl, not exactly helping Herbert’s self esteem, p.223)

This is an oddity, a comedy about under-age sex. But that’s not the only strange thing – it’s odd in all kinds of ways. From the title alone I expected it to be a satire about some doddery old member of the aristocracy, maybe comparable to the mad old geezers found in Tom Sharpe‘s savage farces. I wasn’t expecting ‘his lordship’ to be the nickname given by the girls at a posh boarding school (Southwelling School for Girls, Sussex) to their handsome if clumsy and tormented 35-year-old tennis coach, William Bridgemont Herbert.

Then the next surprise. The novel opens with William in police custody, on remand in Wandsworth Prison (3 miles away from where I live, whose open day museum I once visited and reviewed). The specific causes of this are that he was arrested for being drunk and disorderly at Victoria station and for being in possession, when his suitcase was opened, of a sports awards cup and five pairs of girls’ knickers which he has stolen from Southwelling School.

(It was only a third of the way into the book that it dawned on me that Southwelling might be a rude joke; if said fast enough it sounds like ‘sthwelling’, like ‘swelling’ with a lisp, maybe referring to the engorged condition of the penis which features heavily in the book’s later chapters.)

The novel opens with William, on remand, being questioned or interrogated, by Detective Sergeant Rufus, assigned to William’s case. I thought this might be a preliminary scene before the protagonist would get out and about but it’s not: it settled down to become the format of most of the book, with Rufus returning for renewed interrogations on a daily basis and most of the text consisting of dialogue, as Rufus asks questions and William answers them – then, in every chapter, the dialogue morphing into William’s memories of events as given by a third-person narrator.

In fact the whole thing turns into an extensive overview of the life and actions of this William Bridgemont Herbert and you wonder whether such a slender subject can really support an entire novel, especially when the narrative goes out of its way to emphasise what a boring, suburban non-entity William is.

His life story, as told to Rufus, features a whole series of failures and humiliations, not least his efforts to impress his unhappy wife, Louise (‘she told me she’d never enjoyed a single moment in bed with me’) which uniformly end in failure, so much so that she eventually leaves him for someone more interesting (Mr George Sherman, the deputy town clerk).

As William tells his life story to Rufus, his supposed crimes (drunk and disorderly, stealing a cup from his place of work) barely seem to justify the prolonged period of remand and the massive, extensive interrogation which the novel records.

But there are more surprises. The first is the very strange dynamic which develops between Rufus and William who enter into a kind of creepy friendship – calling each other by their first names, discussing Rufus’s wife’s pregnancy and then the delivery of his first child, it develops into an odd, unrealistic, eerie relationship. And it’s all given a peculiarly uncomfortable tone when Rufus assaults William. At one point, early on, Rufus reaches across the interview table and slaps William, and then grabs his nose and twists it, painfully. We only know this because of the spelling of William’s sudden, pained pleas for him to stop:

‘My nothe! Snnnnoppitt! Snnnoppitt, Rufuth! You’re bloody hurting…’ (p.35)

I think this is meant to be funny, maybe in the knockabout comic tradition of Norman Wisdom or a Carry On film, but it mainly comes over as strange and creepy. Between the comedy world of the 1970s and the contemporary world of 2024 we’ve heard so many stories of police brutality, climaxing in the grotesque case of Sarah Everard and Wayne Couzens, that it’s hard to take the descriptions of a policeman slapping and twisting the nose of his interviewee with anything other than revulsion. It comes over as not funny but grim.

But all these other surprises pale before the big daddy of them all, the novel’s central theme, which is that William appears to be a pervert and a voyeur. I initially found him difficult to categorise because he’s not the modern idea of a paedophile: according to Wikipedia, a pedophile is someone who’s attracted to prepubescent children (‘psychiatric diagnostic criteria for pedophilia extend the cut-off point for prepubescence to age 13’). William is not this; his problem is he’s sexually attracted to post-pubescent schoolgirls from, say, 12 or 13 to 16 or 17. So he’s not a real monster but his obsession with schoolgirls is nonetheless uncomfortable and creepy.

This is what this novel is about – a 35-year-old, dim, hapless man who is overwhelming sexually attracted to schoolgirls and at the same times fights (or claims to fight) his obsession.

Because this is another odd thing about the narrative, which is William’s self-deception. He is a profoundly unreliable narrator. As I’ve mentioned, every chapter features interview scenes between him and Rufus which, at some point, cut away to a third-person description of what took place, generally inflected by or seen from, William’s point of view. Yet when the interview dialogue resumes we are often surprised to learn that the entire account we’ve just read is false and misleading.

A classic example is when we read William’s account of one of the many incidents that eventually drove him to leave the small town where he lived (Midford-Pallant) and look for another job, namely when he was driving his dad’s van in the high street and knocked over a woman. He himself admits, in his telling of it to Detective Rufus, to the sexualised sensation of picking the woman up to carry her to the kerb, one arm under her parting legs, the other round her torso enough to just touch the outline of her breasts. That’s pervy enough.

But William’s apparently candid account is interrupted by Rufus once again grabbing Herbert’s nose and twisting it hard because he knows that this whole account is a fib: the person William knocked down was a schoolgirl. William claims not to have noticed at which Rufus reminds him that she was wearing a school uniform and carrying a satchel, which William then, grudgingly, concedes.

This is not the only time when William tells a reasonably innocent version of an anecdote about women or girls which Rufus then violently corrects. I wondered whether this is how the novel started, with Thomas thinking it would be an interesting experiment to write a whole novel about a man who lies to himself, and others, and then cast around for the type of person who would do that, before settling on the idea of someone who is conflicted about their sexuality, specifically a man who is compulsively attached to ogling schoolgirls, but continually trying to fight the compulsion and lying to himself about it?

To recap: we are in a prison interview room where a pretend friendly, but occasionally violent police detective is interviewing, over a series of days, a thirty-something man, who’s separated from his wife, lost his job at a bank, taken another job as a tennis coach at a girls’ boarding school, and has been arrested for being drunk and disorderly at Victoria station.

Some of it is definitely funny, such as the description of William trying to make himself more ‘interesting’ to his bored wife by drinking too much at a tennis club party, winning the raffle, and barely being able to walk up to collect his prize. That’s the standard kind of ‘humiliate the pathetic anti-hero’ scene you find in novels by Kingsley Amis, Tom Sharpe or Howard Jacobson.

But the nervy atmosphere in the interview room is both boringly samey and unpleasant. That’s not at all funny.

And then there are all the pervy scenes. These come in at least two categories. 1) First there’s the dirty old man type, voyeur type scenes, such as the repeated description of William spying on the sports ground  of his local girls school from a van with a hole cut in the side. The existence of the spy hole and William’s repeated denials of it until Rufus forces him to admit it, are these meant to be funny? They made my flesh creep. Is that the intention?

But 2) once William’s got the job at the girls boarding school there are, of course, many more encounters between him and teenage girls and the early ones of these are, I think, designed to titillate the (male) reader, while the later ones are straight out porn, designed to arouse.

For example, the scene which he and the copper both go over again and again, when William was called to the school swimming pool changing rooms because one of the girls was supposedly drowning, and thus finds himself, as in a dream, in a steamy room surrounded by young teenage girls wearing only loose towels. This feels like a scene from a soft porn movie.

Even more erotically charged is the scene where one of the girls comes to his study late one evening, ostensibly to confess to pushing another girl down the stairs, but a quite palpable sexual tension develops, at least on William’s side. He finds himself saying that, if they were at a boys’ school, he’d put her over his knee and spank her. To which this teenage girl replies, with deliberate erotic provocation, ‘Try me’. This feels like it’s intended to be titillating.

For the first half or so of the book what stops it being pornography is that there is no actual sex. In the scene I’ve just described William struggles to keep control of himself (as he knows he must) and eventually breaks the spell by grabbing the girl’s shoulders, turning her round, marching her to the door and bidding her goodnight, before getting into bed and hugging the pillow in frustration (at least that’s what he says he does).

These scenes might have a titillating front but they are more about the protagonist’s struggle with himself, his struggle to control his urges (‘You don’t know how I tried to fight it off,’ p.153), so is that what the book is about ? Is it intended to be a portrait of a man attracted to schoolgirls who gets his dream job at a girls’ school but then struggles every day to control and rein in his desires (‘I didn’t want it to happen. I did all I could,’ p.155)?

Having looked up the definition of pedophile and concluded that William is not one, I wondered if there’s a term for men who are attracted to high school aged girls and, of course, there is, in fact there appear to be two: Hebephilia is when adults are sexually attracted to people under the age of consent (generally between 12 and 15 years); but there’s an overlapping term, Ephebophilia, which is when an older adult is sexually attracted to post-pubescent teenagers, usually those in the age range 15 to 19.

Looking for clues to how to read it, I read the blurbs on the back of the ancient Pan paperback I own: ‘A girls’ school that makes St Trinians sound like a nunnery’ (The Listener), ‘Ripe comedy, very funny’ (Daily Express). But it’s nowhere near as funny as the St Trinians books or films, and there’s more of the strange and creepy about it than the humorous.

Am I misunderstanding it? Is it just a straightforward entertainment from a distant era, from the smutty innuendo-laden late 1960s and early 1970s, the era of the worst Carry On films and the Confessions of a Window Cleaner-type smut-fests?

(Right at the end of the text we learn that the final pages are set in November 1968, page 227. According to his court case he was arrested on 25 July (p.236), and the text describes most of the events at the school as taking place that spring and summer of 1968. We also learn that the police detained him for precisely 14 days, although it feels like much longer.)

Or is it something more literary i.e. complicated, intended to be a psychological portrait of a sad man who’s attracted to schoolgirls but tries to deny and/or control his urges? I admit to being confused all the way through as to how to respond to it.

Incidents

Even more confusing is the stream of bizarre or surreal incidents. One which has Rufus in stitches is the story about William, once established at the girls school, buying a scooter. Once morning he went shopping to the local town and some of the girls had a pass and were in town, too and they attached a condom to the exhaust of his scooter so that when he turned the scooter on the condom began to inflate, making passersby point and laugh. Then, as he scooted away, the condom inflated to ten feet or so in length, so that traffic stopped to see it, before it finally pinged free of the exhaust and went flying all over the high street, as released balloons do. From that point onwards, William was as much of a laughing stock in Southwelling as he had been in Midford-Pallant. The classic gormless twit of English comedy video almost all the films of Ian Carmichael.

The backdrop to the arrest and his present plight gets going when William describes being in Oxford Street on Christmas Eve (1967), caught in the mad shopping crowds (which brought to mind the cartoon depictions of exactly this scene in Posy Simmonds’ 2018 graphic novel, Cassandra Darke).

So William is hurrying through the crowd and next thing he knows he’s knocked over a dwarf, who lays floundering on his back – that’s odd enough. Panicking, William doesn’t help the poor man up but runs off and ducks into the first available dark doorway. This turns out to be into a dancehall where couples are half-heartedly shuffling the afternoon away – which all feels surreal enough. Then William confesses to Rufus that he at first danced with a 12-year-old girl – which definitely feels creepy. But he ends up chatting up some mature women, one of whom, Blanche, asks him to take her home and it’s only when they’re almost there that hapless William realises she’s a prostitute. Being typically ineffectual, he hasn’t got the guts to turn her down and so is forced to fork out the £5 price for sex, although, typically, he has to make the fifth pound up from of scattered silver and copper coins in his pocket.

So Blanche takes William up to her dingy flat which, as always in these kinds of stories, is dirty and ramshackle and where she disconcerts him, as always happens, by just stripping off, applying a condom to his member and telling him to hurry up and get it over with. So they have just begun to have sex when the door bursts open to reveal Blanche’s flatmate barging into the room, a massive tank of a woman who is blind drunk and starts shouting and singing, which in turn triggers the Asian man who runs the curry house next door to start banging on the wall, which triggers big Babs to start shouting back, while Blanche starts yelling at Babs, and poor William lies there stark naked, aroused and quivering with fear etc.

And all this is part of the narrative being told to Detective Rufus, who periodically interrupts with questions to clarify the details. Is it meant to be funny? Is it meant to be part of building up the character of William as naive and inept, an innocent in the ways of the world? Is it meant to explain why he is attracted to young girls – for the simple reason that he doesn’t know how to handle grown-up women, or sees them in terms of these grotesques?

In the middle of describing it all to Rufus, William mentions that he was still inside the prostitute as she started yelling at her drunk friend to shut up and that each time she yelled, it tightened her cervical muscle around his penis quite painfully. At which Rufus chips in that the same thing happens when women cough; his wife has a persistent cough so he’s often experienced it.

What are we to make of this? Was this acceptable lad talk in the late 1960s? It may indeed be the kind of thing which men might discuss, but in the context of this novel is it intended to be funny, or a little creepy?

Anyway the comic scene in the prostitute’s flat ends with them both discovering that he likes schoolgirls and so the massive woman, Babs, slips into a schoolgirl outfit and starts whipping him. Then she jumps on top of him to create a William sandwich, asphyxiating between two hulking women. Rufus is crying tears of laughter at hearing all this and I can see how all this fits certain antique comedy tropes, but I was more appalled than amused.

The only reason William’s in London is that the school broke up for Christmas and everyone just left, so he packed up and got a cab to the station with some of the girls and mistresses and since they were going to London so he went along with them, all the time lying his head off about the fabulous people he was going to parties with (the Prime Minister, actresses) and the great Christmas he was going to have.

Instead he checks into a cheap hotel, the Abbey Castle Private Hotel, in the Bayswater Road and has the miserable Christmas Eve I’ve just described, knocking down the dwarf, the sad dance hall, chaos with shouting hookers.

The next day the hotel are having a Christmas dinner for its guests, hosted by the ancient landlady. Characteristically, William attends the pre-meal drinks but then slips away, making excuses that he’s just popping out for a moment. And then spends all of Christmas Day walking lonely and sad round the empty streets of London and what is on his mind? Terror that he might have caught the clap off these two prostitutes.

His description of walking around London in the 3 o’clock darkness of Christmas Day is affecting and sad, especially when he walks into the grey muddy waste of Battersea Park:

Leaves were running in blind crowds, making a tinny sound, across the open spaces and huddling under canvas screens. (p.80)

William’s long, miserable Christmas walk includes playing in the tree walks in Battersea Park, then sitting in a deckchair on the grey muddy Embankment before he ends up at a Seaman’s Mission in the East End. Here, as usual, he lies about his origins, saying he’s a sailor from Antwerp and ends up becoming very popular by leading sing-songs of classic Gilbert and Sullivan songs, ones he’s learned from the operetta-mad headmistress of Southwelling school. It’s a rare moment when he feels liked and respected for being ‘Antwerp Herbert’.

This whole passage has got nothing to do with ‘St Trinians’ nor is it ‘Ripe comedy, very funny’. At best it’s bitter sweet, at worst quite grimly depressing.

What follows is farce. He had been invited to the Christmas party at his Bayswater hotel but told the agèd host he was just popping out, and had never gone back. Anyway, he had been missed and when one of the guests heard a knocking from under the floorboards, in a chaotic comic way, the senile guests became convinced William had gotten into the cellar and got locked in.

The comic upshot is that William arrives back at the hotel to discover the landlady has called the fire brigade who are in the middle of prising up the floorboards in order to get to the cellar and free him. When he walks into the building, everyone goes mental, shouting blame and recriminations at him. He packs his bags and leaves. Everywhere he goes he causes disaster and mayhem.

Walking the streets, he decides on a whim to buy some second-hand boots he sees in a shop window and walk from London to Derby. Why Derby? Well, earlier in the story, after his wife left him and he ran away from Midford-Pallant, he had ended up arriving in Derby where he got a job working in a post office. Here he was recognised by a tennis-mad upper-class lady, Mrs Ferber, as being a county tennis champion, because that’s one of the oddest and least plausible things about this character – a failure in absolutely every aspect of his life, he is, nonetheless, a champion tennis player.

Outraged that he’s working in a poxy little post office, Mrs Ferber invites him for tea at her posh mansion and she and her husband decide to give him a helping hand, telling him that there just happens to be a vacancy for a tennis instructor at the boarding school in Sussex which their twin teenage daughters attend. And that was how he got the job at Southwelling.

Anyway, he’s got three weeks to kill before the next term starts and doesn’t want to stay in London so…why not walk all the way to Derby to visit the Ferbers and tell them how their kindness is working out? So off he sets, amid improbable descriptions of the lovely scenery (no mention of A roads or motorways or endless juggernauts spraying him with diesel-infused puddles).

But his route takes him past his old town, Midford-Pallant, and when a bus comes along with that as its destination just as he’s passing a bus stop, he automatically gets in, unable to stop himself, he alights at the town centre, and then he finds himself outside the house where his ex-wife, Louise, lives with her new man, pacing up and down in his big hiking boots, trying to pluck up the nerve to go and knock.

Comically, it turns out that Louise has been observing William from the neighbour’s house across the street, both of them falling about laughing at his odd behaviour. In his mind William is a sensitive, tortured soul; to everyone else he is a plonker.

Anyway, it turns out that Louise is none-too-happy with her lover George Sherman, who claims to work late and is always going to ‘works parties’ which he doesn’t take her to, leading her to suspect he is being unfaithful. So Louise now plies William with sherry and then, to his astonishment, leads him upstairs to the bedroom where she strips naked and starts playing with her big breasts. William is half way through taking his clothes off when he suddenly remembers THE CLAP – his pecker is still really sore and he hasn’t had results back from the clap clinic which he visited on Boxing Day (all of this he blames on the two hookers, Blanche and Babs).

Long story short, he finds himself in the classic comedy scenario of being in a bedroom with a gorgeous busty woman stripped naked and gagging for sex and…having to turn her down. (As a comparison, this happens not once but twice to the hapless hero of William Boyd’s comic novel A Good Man In Africa).

William makes a stream of feeble excuses (he has holes in his socks) until Louise’s patience snaps and she switches from sex kitten to furious harpy, boxing him round the ears, throwing things at him, screaming him out of the bedroom, down the stairs and out of the house, where he stands doing up his trousers and tucking his shirt in while the neighbours watch from behind their net curtains, chortling at this latest episode in the silly life of William Herbert.

At moments like this William is the standard hapless loser antihero of a hundred English comic novels… except that the narrative keeps reminding us that he has this fetish for schoolgirls and that all these events are flashbacks from the core situation, which is him in prison being interviewed by threatening Detective Rufus.

After more minor mishaps en route, William finally arrives in Derby and is hanging round outside the Ferbers’ house when he’s discovered by the twins who are out cycling and it’s all hugs and kisses and invitations to their New Year’s Eve party. Anyone who’s read a comic novel knows this will go badly.

Leslie’s sentences

I read Thomas’s debut novel The Virgin Soldiers because it connected to my reading about the post-war Emergency in Malaya, itself part of a loose post-colonial reading project. But I discovered I enjoyed Thomas’s sense of humour, his coarse, non-middle-class worldview, but most of all his imaginative and entertaining way with the language – so I was prompted to buy the Virgin Soldiers sequels and then to explore some of his non-Virgin Soldier novels. About the characters and the plots of these I am a lot less sure, but I still enjoy the surprising quality of many of his sentences:

Louise’s hand came across the table and pulled at him roughly like a sergeant catching a sleeping sentry. (p.24)

He felt like a man in a midget submarine. (p.30)

It was a mute Midlands evening when he came out of the station and walked among the quiet shops and the dumb office fronts. There were a few entwined couples around, all arms and aimlessness, looking at the engagement rings in the windows of Bravingtons… (p.31)

There are few things so levelling as licking other people’s stamps. (p.32)

Curled leaves were lying in worried groups about the paths and lawns, waiting pessimistically for the wind or the broom. (p.37)

She wore a smirk as carelessly as she wore her clothes. (p.56)

Something strange and panic-stricken was running around inside him like a family of disorganised mice. (p.56)

She pulled her smirk in like someone tightening a string bag. (p.58)

The miniature days after Christmas were fine and cold-edged. (p.91)

He rolled into bed in his shirt, turned out the light and lay there with the flickerings of an indifferent moon entering through the low window and sharing his eiderdown. (p.94)

[In a library] there were old men crouched, as though in prayer, over the newspapers in the reading room, and a large young woman, so rounded she looked as if she’d been pumped up that morning, sat behind a desk. (p.117)

Second half

It’s only in the second half that the novel starts to pick up speed, becoming more genuinely comical and also, for the first time, featuring actual sex, not of the farcical romp style of Blanche and Babs, but described with sympathy and sensuality, genuinely erotic sex – first with one of the Southwelling girls and then, scandalously, with a whole roster of them!

To begin with, though, there’s more farce. The posh Ferbers have a big New Years Eve party. Feeling unsociable and conscious of the growing soreness of his penis (which he is terrified is caused by ‘a dose’) William loiters by the phone in the main room. Unable to bear his frustration he calls the clap clinic where he gave a urine sample on Boxing Day and begs them to tell him the result, even though, characteristically, the doctors at the other end are having their own party and are pretty tipsy.

They take his number and promise to ring him back which is when, of course, William finds himself being coerced by his hostess into taking part in some ridiculous game where the guests split up into two teams and each team runs a long ribbon with a spoon on down their trousers or down their skirts until they are all joined together on the one string. it is, of course, at this point that the phone rings and it’s the clinic ready to give him his results only he can’t make it to the phone. When he tries he drags the entire team of ten or so guests after him, falling over each other, collapsing in a heap which some find hilarious and makes some quite angry, but not before someone else has answered the phone, takes the message from the clinic and shouts out William’s test result to the entire roomful of laughing clapping guests.

Thomas manages this comic scene (pages 127 to 138) with great skill, totally involving the reader in William’s mounting, hysterical panic. In the event, the clinic give his result as a poem which is so cryptic none of the other guests understands what it means, which is just as well.

But the most important thing about the whole stay with the Ferbers is that he is hit on by the prettiest girl at Southwelling, Connie Rowan, a knowing 16 year old. Ostensibly she is being squired about by an eligible young American man, but in reality she and William keep finding themselves along together as her flirtation becomes more and more obvious.

After a few days more, William makes his excuses and leaves, declaring he will walk back to Surrey. In the event he’s picked up by a lorry whose rough working-class driver regales him with stories about picking up female hitch-hikers and rogering them in the bed at the back of the cab, although he also tells a sort of poignant story about a teenage couple he picked up, drove for a while, stopped at some services for a pee and, when he came back to the cab, found them going at it hammer and tongs. He was about to open the door and get angry, then he stayed still and watched for the porn value, but then he was overcome by a sort of fatherly feeling, jealous but also admiring of their energy and optimism and simple enjoyment. If only he was young again (sigh).

Anyway, he finds himself back at the school, weeks before the next term starts, with just the Gilbert and Sullivan-loving principal, Miss Smallwood, and the foxy American girl, Connie. Days of being nearly alone together, meaningful glances, they play tennis together and get hot and sweaty. Eventually she comes to his room, makes him close the curtains, strips to the waist, and that’s it. They make love. It is described at length, over several pages, with adult seriousness, with sensuality and sympathy. She’s a knowing, mature girl. It it nothing like pedophilia, and more serious and complex than anything in St Trinians.

His control had surprised him. He loved her so immensely; his concern, his anxiety was all for her. Her girl’s body took him and gave him the softest comfort he had ever realised. They made their love for a long period, laying across his bed in patterns, turning and trying, until they knew they could delay no longer… (p.160)

Next evening he goes to her bed where she rides him, at first in her pink nightdress etc. We have entered the full-blooded sexual part of the novel. Remember that all these scenes are interspersed with, or revert back to, the primary location which is William being interrogated by Detective Rufus, scenes accompanied by their own nexus of concerns about Rufus’s wife being heavily pregnant, then going into hospital and giving birth, then Rufus looking groggy because he’s being kept up all night be a crying baby etc.

Back at the school, the other girls return. William reverts to pervy voyeur mode when he discovers there is a hole in the ceiling of the dormitory where Connie and the other oldest girls sleep, so a couple of times he climbs up into the attic, using the indoor umpire’s stand as a ladder, and shuffles along the dusty rafters, dodging cobwebs and getting splinters in his knees, in order to peep down on the girls stripping off, changing into their pyjamas, sometimes oiling their nubile young bodies etc. We learn that William masturbates while he watches the girls because rude, rough Rufus tells him the pillow they found there was sent for forensic testing and revealed traces of semen. Some moments, like the lovemaking scenes, are described with real sensual care, and then here’s William wanking in the attic. I never figured how to settle and take this book, whether to be revolted or touched or amused, or bounce between all three reactions.

Long story short, Connie turns out to be more conniving and calculating than she seemed. For a start she sends four of the other girls in the dormitory along to take her place, each encounter being described in Thomas’s sensual mode, with farcical sidelights. At the same time she plays practical jokes on him and tricks him. On the occasion when he creeps through the loft space, she realises he’s spying on them and, while he’s busy masturbating as he watches the other girls, she sneaks off and silently wheels the umpire’s stand away from the entrance to the attic, so that, half an hour later, William, feeling blindly for it in the dark, falls fifteen feet to the hard corridor floor and twists his ankle. Connie makes him feel like an idiot and that is because he is an idiot.

There’s a long passage devoted to describing the annual school trip to an island, Downsley Island (p.190) off the Pembrokeshire coast with some of the women teachers and a dozen or so girls. Here William is propositioned by the ugly tug-like Jackie MacAllister who threatens to tell on him if he won’t have sex with her, which he proceeds to do to his own disgust. More intriguingly, he witnesses the really bizarre lesbian behaviour of Miss Tilling who gets her girls to strip down to their singlets and then re-enact battles in the exposed countryside.

Adding an extra level of weirdness, the frail headmistress suddenly stumbles and plummets down a chute of muddy shale into the sea where she nearly drowns until rescued by air-sea rescue and William forms the pretty clear idea that she was pushed by the vicious girls. Underlying all the sexy frolics is William’s dismay at discovering that the ‘innocent’ girls have agendas of their own, such as these acts of revenge on adults. They are, he comes to suspect, using him entirely for their own ends.

The main narrative builds, like so many comic novels, to a Grand Climax in the form of a formal, institutional event, a grand occasion or ceremony which, of course, ends in disaster. In this story it takes the form of the interschool tennis championship, the Clifton Cup, which school head Miss Smallwood wants to win, trouncing last year’s winners, her bitter rivals, St Margaret’s school (p.216).

After a lot of build-up, the actual tennis goes very well, the school’s best pair Connie and Susan Belling crushing the opposition. Things go wrong because William drinks too much sherry (a drink he becomes more partial to throughout the book, cf his wife Louise getting him drunk on sherry in order to seduce him, earlier on). He’s drinking because a) he’s devastated to realise that Connie, who he’s convinced is the love of his life, will be leaving at the end of this term i.e. in a matter of weeks, and also realises that b) the rate at which the 16-year-olds are throwing themselves at him isn’t sustainable. He needs to leave before someone finds out and he’s arrested.

The farcical climax feels contrived. At the last moment the headmistress asks him to play an ‘exhibition match’ against St Margaret’s coach, apparently ignoring the fact that his twisted ankle still hasn’t healed and that he’s roaring drunk.

When a teacher knocks on his door to tell him about the exhibition match, William is in fact having sex with Connie. She came to find him after her famous victory in the championship, discovers him drunk and maudlin, one thing leads to another and they have a glorious last bonk. They’ve more or less finished when the teacher knocks on the door and talks through it, while Connie stifles her giggles. When the teacher leaves William loses his temper and spanks her. Then he loses his self control and spanks her hard, again and again, until she wriggles free, furiously angry and upset. She quickly dresses yelling abuse at him, storms to the door and then yells that she’s pregnant before storming out and slamming the door.

This emotional tornado explains why William has a few more swigs of sherry, struggles into his tennis gear, staggers out onto the court, and is playing like a drunk man when, mercifully, the sky clouds over and the mother of all storms erupts, with forked lightning and everything. All the teachers, girls and parents flee indoors. William goes to jump playfully over the next, completely misjudges it, trips and falls flat on his face, knocking himself out.

When he regains consciousness some time later, all of him hurts and he is soaked through by the storm. In an alcoholic stupor he staggers back into the school, along to his room, throws his few measly belongings into his suitcase and calls a taxi to take him to the station. He changes trains at Lewes and catches a train to London with the drunken aim of finding Connie. It’s here that he drunkenly sits back on a table in a caff and sits on a tourist’s hamburger and fries, which leads to a quarrel, the police being called and him being arrested. And remanded to Wandsworth and to the series of interrogations by Detective Rufus which we’ve just been reading. I.e. the narrative has come full circle bringing us up to date.

With his interrogations complete, Rufus packs up his dossier and bids William farewell, pointing out he hopes he gets lucky at his trial given the appalling defence counsel he’s been awarded, one ‘Mr Decent’.

William’s ‘conquests’:

• Connie Rowan
• Susan Belling p.179
• Jackie MacAllister p.204
• Tina Ferber p.210
• Pamela Watts aka Yum Yum p.215

Comic twists

At which point the setting finally cuts away from the claustrophobic interview room and reveals not one but a whole heap of comic twists. Once outside the interview room Rufus is referred to by other coppers by his real name and it’s not Rufus. We learn in quick succession that the detective’s name is not Rufus but Trevor, he is not married, so his wife has not had a baby and he has not been kept up all night by it.

So ‘Rufus’ is as big a fantasist and liar as William is. On the many occasions when Rufus twisted William’s nose in order to force the truth out of him, ‘Rufus’ himself was lying. Two levels of lying. Two lying liars lying to each other.

Trevor is called into his boss’s office and learns that William is not going to court after all, the case against him has been dropped. Apparently no witnesses can be found. None of the girls will own up to having under-age sex, the star witness Connie, has flown back to the States, the head mistress loves William for coaching her cup-winning team, all the other (female) teachers adored him. When pushed, some of the girls admit to making him the panties found in his suitcase as a present and one of them says it was Connie who put the cup in his suitcase, so they can’t get him for any kind of theft.

Not that it was ever a very serious case, but everything’s evaporated except the charge of being drunk and disorderly. In the event, we see a brief description of the trial in which Mr Decent, far from being a doddering incompetent, turns out to be a zip sharp lawyer who gets the judge to apologise to William for having him remanded for so long, which reduces his fine to 5 shillings, and he walks free.

The last chapter presents yet another twist. It opens with a bunch of middle-aged male perverts, lechers and voyeurs lined up along the fence of a school playing field watching a bunch of 14-year-old schoolgirls playing netball. Point is that among them is Detective Trevor. He’s one of them, too!

And he’s not surprised when William appears at his side, doesn’t bother to defend himself. Takes one to know one. The shoe is on the other foot now and William rattles off a list of issues Trevor is beset by. While William had been inside Trevor had gone down to Southwelling, confiscated William’s motorbike, brought it back to London, sold it and bought a very snazzy suit. But when William visited Trevor’s boss, along with his lawyer, they hurriedly said they’d restore his motorbike. The lawyer is also threatening to sue the police for wrongful arrest.

So the positions have been completely reversed – now Trevor is the shabby pervert and William is in the driving seat. On the last page he delivers an author’s message of sorts, weird and cranky though it seems:

‘The trouble with schoolgirls, you know, is once you get really interested in the creatures and start thinking about them it’s very difficult to remember what’s fact and what isn’t. Even some of the facts I told you in the cell may not have been absolutely right.’ (p.238)

So the text kind of autodestructs, in a very postmodern kind of way. We thought William had been lying because he was a shabby pervert ashamed of his lusts and honest Rufus had been correcting him. Now we are told that we have misunderstood the entire situation. Quite possibly William was making up a lot of the incidents the text has described in order to draw Rufus in, because he had spotted that Rufus was a fellow pervert. Maybe a lot of what he said was a lie. Maybe it all was.

Hard to credit that these were bestselling books in their day: sure they have lots of titillating schoolgirl sex and some scenes of broad farce and yet, they come over as so strange, on so many levels.

Credit

His Lordship by Leslie Thomas was published by Michael Joseph in 1970. References are to the 1970 Pan paperback edition.

Leslie Thomas reviews

• The Virgin Soldiers (1966)
• His Lordship (1970)
• Onward Virgin Soldiers (1971)
• Tropic of Ruislip (1974)
• Stand Up Virgin Soldiers (1975)
• Dangerous Davies: The Last Detective (1976)