ALONG the claims made for that ideal life lived in the imaginations of the good folk of the Edwardian age was its Purity. Most people were supposed to be more or less pure, and in the case of the autobiographical type this was stressed very aggressively. I remember being told, on our second day’s acquaintance on a liner, by a proud and happy mother, apropos of a rather lumpish son of seventeen or eighteen who may or may not have been just out of earshot, “That boy is still as pure as the driven snow.” (I don’t think I saw his face.) But they kept up the make-believe so widely that mostly they did believe that the majority of the people about them who seemed to be leading pure lives were in fact leading pure lives. You have witnessed Mrs Tewler’s struggle to keep our hero pure. And here I recall my never to be sufficiently lamented Mrs Humbelay and how she was saying something about forgetting one’s dreams and imaginations, when she so unhappily went under the threshold of audibility and was lost to us.

Those people who still seek and profess purity in our harder world must murder and banish memories to a wonderful extent. True that almost all animals forget sexual experiences very readily. That is understandable of animals, who have their transitory annual rutting, because otherwise the creatures would always be in a state of unseasonable excitement. But man is an unseasonable creature and he does not naturally forget so completely. Consider all our pastors and teachers, and particularly consider the case of Mr Myame, His passion for Purity, for the complete suppression of any thought of an approach to a sexual act, in himself and others, assumed an undeniable frightfulness.

The English-speaking world has altered so rapidly that it is already difficult to believe that before the World War of 1914–18, The Times would rather have died of shame than have admitted such words as syphilis or venereal disease to the massive chastity of its columns, and that when that unforgettable heroine, Ettie Rout, came from New Zealand to distribute precautionary packets to the Anzac soldiers, telling them to control themselves if they could but use the packet if they couldn’t, the blushing military authorities, men no doubt leading exceptionally holy lives, who imagined that these unpleasant contagions, now rapidly fading out of existence in our franker world, were God’s vindictive device to punish impurity in his creatures, did their best to back up their God and suppress her. And Mr Myame, forgetting to his utmost ability, forgetting it may be altogether, or remembering only dimly as one is haunted by a horrible dream, fought as stoutly as the Blimpest of Colonel Blimps in the same losing fight against reality.

So, in accordance with the wishes of the late Mrs Tewler and after a noiseless vigil in the Joseph Hart dormitory, followed by a close inspection of Edward Albert’s bed clothes, he called the young man into his study and handed him a serious-looking volume. It was only a few days before Edward Albert became an adder. Mr Myame gave him the book and he charged his account for it. Whether he would have done so after the great shock is an idle speculation. “I want you to read this very very carefully indeed, Tewler,” he said.

“There are things in this. . . . It is high time you knew them.”

Mr Myame paused. “It’s a book for your very private reading. I should be careful not to leave it about or let it fall into the hands of your younger schoolfellows.”

The book was entitled Dr Scaber’s What a Young Man Should Know. It had been, it said in a brief preface, a guide and help to many generations of struggling souls, so that it was at latest Victorian. It had revealed the facts of life frankly and helpfully to them and saved them from terrible dangers. There was no indication of what sort of Doctorate Dr Scaber held, nor indeed any biographical material whatever. Edward Albert read, at first with curiosity and then with a deepening dismay. “Gaw!” he whispered to himself. “You can’t be too careful. If only I’d known.”

The little book told............