These tales of mob and gang will be appreciated by man and boy, but especially by those of us who have survived fifty-odd years of life in Britain. Our day-school years in the Thirties were much influenced by the public school system, expressed in schoolmasters' aspirations and schoolboys' comics. Simon Raven's notorious devotion to that system began when he was only a seven-year-old comic reader, as he admits in The Old School, a loving but mordant survey of the dormitory schools: he went on avidly to Charterhouse and he fancies other men will envy or scorn that experience, as he himself scorns or envies men from rival dormitories. Such is the gang spirit. Then, in our teens or twenties, we entered the mob, post-war conscripts in the years of National Service: here the public schoolboys came into their own, hogging the Queen's Commission and acquiring conscript valets. Trevor Royle, a serious young Scot, describes 'the National Service Experience, 1945-63' in his worthy book, The Best Years of Their Lives: he feels sorry that he was too young to meet this challenge himself.

LRB 8 January 1987 | PDF Download