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mansion near Tunbridge Wells. The experience was an eye-opener. To judge by your MS you regarded Smith as a fully charismatic figure. Hindsight is a treacherous guide, but I believe that even as a boy I took him with an occasional pinch of salt. Certainly as a member of his stain found him very difficult to cope with.
    For a start he was not a very intelligent man, but vain, jealous of ideas other than his own, and particularly jealous of anyone who seemed to be achieving popularity with the boys. He had a military view of his staff: he was the commanding officer; Stock, Floyd and Hutton were his NCOS; the rest of us privates. He would speak to us, often in front of each other, as if that were really the case. Our salaries were low, even by prep-school standards. He was in general extremely mean with money except where it concerned the boys; and even there he was only generous in particular ways; feeding them well, for instance, but not considering that he could attract better staff and thus get better scholarship and CE results if he paid better wages. I remember studying the Scholarship Boards. They used to hang in the Chapel at Brighton, and I expect stayed there throughout the war, but when the school moved permanently to Fenner Green he had them hung in the entrance hall. Yours, I think, was the only Eton Scholarship in fifty years. There had been two or three to Winchester. The rest were practically all soft options, Lancing and so on. Yet Smith was extremely proud of them.
    You will gather I took a considerable dislike to him during my two terms. I admit, with an effort, that he had an intuitive genius with boys, a real love for them which disaffected staff were wrong to write off as suppressed sodomy. I did so at the time, but now believe the love to have been much more parental than erotic. The trouble was that Smith saw himself not in loco parentis in the mundane sense but more as a surrogate God the Father. St Aidan’s was his creation. The boys were all young Adams, doomed eventually to eat the apple. He saw potential serpents everywhere.
    No wonder he found it so difficult to keep staff; you will recall the incessant comings and goings of people like myself. Only Stock, Floyd and Hutton stayed year after year. All three had the same odd relationship with Smith, a kind of despairing loyalty to him and the school. You will remember Stock as a grammarian and martinet. That was what he was, and that was all. Life for him was an exercise as pointless as translating sentences about Balbus and his wall, and the only task was to get through it correctly. He could remember the name of every boy who had been at St Aidan’s in his time, but took no interest in their personalities or their later careers. In his spare time he would read and re-read the detective novels of Freeman Wills Croft, which he described as ‘boring, but less boring than other books’. He had, I believe, been married, but I know nothing of his wife or what became of her.
    Floyd was that tragi-comic creature, the repressed pederast. Of course in that era both the tragedy and the comedy were of a different hue from what they would be now. You will recall how the boys knew that he had favourites. For the staff he was always a soft touch when it came to getting him to take on such chores as duty master, because he preferred the boys’ company to ours. He was both frightened and disgusted by his own drives and stayed at St Aidan’s because he could cope with them there. His bond to Smith was particularly strong; he would not hear one word against him. Smith may have represented to him the barrier of authority which kept his urges in check while allowing him continuous contact with the objects of his desire. I believe Smith understood the situation very well and exploited it by keeping a good teacher on a low salary.
    Both of these were dull dogs, really. Hutton was more interesting, despite being a much worse teacher with little