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Lady Chatterley’s Lover , equally pored over by schoolchildren, you only had to blink and you missed it. Alec remembered a friend reading the book many years later and asking him ‘When do I reach ‘‘the scene’’?’ Aleclooked over his friend’s shoulder and replied ‘You’ve passed it, ten pages past.’ The account seems innocent enough by today’s standards:
Thus did begin a friendship entirely different from any Gordon had ever known before. He did not know what his real sentiments were; he did not even attempt to analyse them. He only knew that when he was with Morecambe he was indescribably happy … Morecambe came up to Gordon’s study nearly every evening, and usually Foster left them alone together … During the long morning hours, when Gordon was supposed to be reading history, more than once there came over him a wish to plunge himself into the feverish waters of pleasure, and forget for a while the doubts and disappointments that overhung his life … he realised how easily he could slip into that life and be engulfed. No one would mind; his position would be the same; no one would think worse of him. Unless, of course, he was caught. Then probably everyone would turn round upon him; that was the one unforgivable sin – to be found out.
    Nothing more than that.
    Alec’s book was in part revenge for his expulsion from Sherborne. He had been a model student: prefect, house captain, editor of the school magazine, winner of the English Verse Prize and member of the first XV and first XI. But then he was discovered in a homosexual relationship with a fellow pupil and ‘asked to leave’. As The Loom of Youth made clear, the ‘unforgivable sin’ in such all-male establishments was not the act itself, but ‘to be found out’.
    The trials of Oscar Wilde still lingered in public memory. Alec had been made a victim of what he and others saw as absurd public hypersensitivity and overreaction towards homosexuality. He was not ‘the immaculate exception’ and he was incensed by the ‘conspiracy of silence’ and the hypocrisy of those who refused to see such sexual experimentation as entirely common: ‘I wonder how many ex-public school boys would deny that at some point in their schooldays they indulged in homosexual practices; practices that had no lasting effect, that they instantly abandoned on finding themselves in an adult, heterosexual world,’ he later wrote.
    The homosexual controversy, however, was only part of the scandal. An equally serious accusation was that Alec’s novel had dared to criticise the public school ethos, the very spirit of which was combating the Hun on the battlefields of France and Belgium. Alec later confessed that his intention had indeed been to expose the myth of the ideal public schoolboy venerated as a pillar of the British Empire. For many, this was his truly unforgivable sin.
    English public schools had been undergoing significant transformation since the second half of the nineteenth century. Reforms by Thomas Arnold at Rugby and the bestselling novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays had popularised a new image of the great boarding schools as nurseries of gentlemanly behaviour and patriotic service. The public school ethos of self-sacrifice on behalf of King and Country, school and friend, reached its apogee in the Great War. On battlefields such as the Somme, the losses were disproportionately high among the public-school-educated officer class. To take Eton as an example. The school had an average of about 1,100 pupils. Imagine the serried ranks of boys in an annual school photograph; 1,157 Old Etonians were wiped out in the war: the equivalent of every child in that photograph. This is what people meant when they talked about the death of a generation.
    The much-lauded image of the courageous public schoolboy, educated in a gentlemanly tradition of chivalry, honour, loyalty, sportsmanship and leadership, sacrificing his life for his country, was dealt a body blow