Books have their fates and this one's has been curious. I wrote it between January and March 1916, when I was seventeen and a half years old and in camp at Berkhamsted with the Inns of Court O.T.C. I loathed it there, everything about it, the impersonal military machine, the monotonous routine of drills and musketry, the endless foot-slogging, the perpetual petty fault-finding. I kept comparing my present life with that which I had been leading ten, eighteen, thirty months ago at Sherborne, as a schoolboy.

My four years there had been very happy. I was the kind of a boy who gets the most out of a public school. I loved cricket and football and was reasonably good at them. I was in the first XV and my last summer headed the batting averages. My father had lit in me a love of poetry and an interest in history and the classics. More often than not I went into a class-room looking forward to the hour that lay ahead. I enjoyed the whole competitive drama of school life—the cups and caps and form promotions. As I marched as a cadet over Ashridge Park I remembered that a year ago I had been bicycling down to the football field for a punt about on Upper. As I listened to a lecture on the establishment of an infantry brigade, I thought of the sixth form sitting under that fine scholar and Wordsworthian Nowell Smith to a discussion of Victorian poetry. In the evenings on my way to night operations, passing Berkhamsted School and looking at the lighted windows, I would think, "At Sherborne now they are sitting round the games study fire waiting for the bell to ring for hall". Day by day, hour by hour, I pictured myself back at school.

I was in a nostalgic mood, but I was also in a rebellious mood. Intensely though I had enjoyed my four years at Sherborne, I had been in constant conflict with authority. That conflict, so it seemed to me, had been in the main caused and determined by authority's inability or refusal to recognise the true nature of school life. The Public School system was venerated as a pillar of the British Empire and out of that veneration had grown a myth of the ideal Public School boy—Kipling's Brushwood Boy. In no sense had I incarnated such a myth and it had been responsible, I felt, for half my troubles. I wanted to expose it. Those moods of nostalgia and rebellion fused finally in an imperious need to relive my school days on paper, to put it all down, term by term, exactly as it had been, to explain, interpret, justify my point of view.

I wrote the book in six and a half weeks, getting up at half past four every morning and returning to my manuscript at night after the day's parades. I posted it, section by section, to my father who corrected the spelling and punctuation, interjected an occasional phrase and sent it to be typed. I never revised it. As the manuscript shows, it was printed as it was written, paragraph by paragraph.

The book after two or three refusals was accepted by Grant Richards and published in July 1917 in the same week that I was posted as a machine-gun second-lieutenant to the B.E.F. in France. It could not have come out under luckier auspices. It had an immediate news value. There was a boom in soldier poets. Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Nichols, W.J. Turner had recently made their debuts. Here was a soldier novelist, the first and in his teens. As always in war-time there was a demand for books and there was that summer a dearth of novels. A spirit of challenge and criticism was in the air. The war after three years was still "bogged down" and public opinion attributed allied failings in the field to mismanagement in high places. The rebelliousness of The Loom of Youth was in tune with the temper of the hour. Finally I had the immense advantage of being the son of Arthur Waugh. My father as a critic and a publisher was one of the most loved and respected figures in the world of letters. Many were anxious to give his son a chance.

The book had a flattering reception. Nothing of any particular interest was being published at the moment and reviewers welcomed it. J.C. Squire, Gerald Gould, Ralph Straus, C.K. Scott-Moncrieff, E.B. Osborn, all made it their book of the week. Nor was it noticed only in the book sections. Richards had suggested that Thomas Seccombe who was then history professor at Sandhurst and had introduced the book to him, should write a preface. That preface discussed the Public School system in the light of contemporary events. The system, Seccombe wrote, "has fairly helped, you may say, to get us out of the mess of August 1914. Yes, but it contributed heavily to get us into it." The preface encouraged and helped a journalist to use the book as the text for a general article. Within a month it had received twenty-four columns of reviews and was in its third impression. Grant Richards told my father that with any luck he would sell five thousand copies.

That was at the end of the August. Three weeks later the schools went back and half the housemasters in the country found their desks littered with letters from anxious parents demanding an assurance that their Bobbie was not subject to the temptations described in this alarming book. In self-defence the schoolmasters hit back and by mid-November the book had become the centre of violent controversy. In many schools the book was banned and several boys were caned for reading it. Canon Edward Lyttleton, the ex-headmaster of Eton, wrote a ten-page article in The Contemporary—then an influential monthly—explaining how biased and partial a picture the school gave. The Spectator ran for ten weeks and The Nation for six a correspondence filling three or four pages an issue in which schoolmaster after schoolmaster asserted that whatever might be true of "Fernhurst", at his school it was all very different. Grant Richards adeptly fanned the conflagration. He had initiated that summer an original style of advertising. He inserted each week in the Times Literary Supplement a half column of gossip about his books and authors. It was set in small heavy black type, and caught the eye. Richards was a good writer and it was very readable. He was, I think, the first publisher to exploit the publicity value of unfavourable comment. Richard Hughes, at that time in the sixth form at Charterhouse, wrote, as his weekly essay, an attack on The Loom of Youth. His form master, Dames Longworth, a fine old Tory, sent it up to The Spectator, as a counterblast to such "pernicious stuff". Next week Grant Richards quoted him. Mr. Dames Longworth called the book "pernicious stuff", but Clement Shorter prophesied in The Sphere that it would prove "the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Public School system". By Christmas the book was a best seller.

A modern reader will wonder what all this fuss and indignation was about. Two points are to be remembered. First that before World War I Britain's imperial destiny was never questioned, and the Public School system as a bulwark of Empire was held sacrosanct. Second that no book before The Loom of Youth had accepted as part of the fabric of School life the inevitable emotional consequences of a monastic herding together for eight months of the year of thirteen year old children and eighteen year old adolescents. On that issue such a complete conspiracy of silence had been maintained that when fathers were asked by their wives, and schoolmasters by parents who had not themselves been at public schools whether "such things really could take place", the only defence was a grudging admission, "Perhaps in a bad house, in a bad school, in a bad time."

I followed the controversy with mixed feelings. I was delighted of course at the book's success. At the same time I was distressed at being accused of having libelled the school where I had been so happy, to which I was so devoted, and to so many of whose masters—in particular its headmaster—I owed so much.

Well, that is all a long long time ago, and usually nothing is more dead and dated than the book which once caused controversy. Yet The Loom of Youth has continued to sell steadily from one year to the next; in 1928 it was included in Cassell's Pocket Library; in 1942 it was issued as a Penguin and now that the original plates are wearing out, Mr. Martin Secker and the directors of The Richards Press feel that it is worth their while to reset the type and give the book another lease of life. I hope that their confidence will be justified. If it is, it will be for reasons very different from those which made The Loom of Youth a best seller in 1917. The modern reader will find nothing here to shock or startle him. Several years ago a friend was reading the book in my company. "When do I reach the scene?" he asked. I looked over his shoulder. "You've passed it, ten pages back," I told him. At the same time the book is not presented as a "period piece". Though England to-day is a different country, socially and economically, from what it was in 1911 when I went to Sherborne, I do not think that in essentials the life of the Public School boy has greatly changed. Most schools are larger than they were, but they have retained the same traditions and ideals; there is the same atmosphere of rivalry and competing loyalties; youth has the same basic problems, is fired by the same ambitions, beset by the same doubts. And if the modern reader, after turning a page or two finds his attention held and wants to go on reading, it will mean that this book has become at last what in fact it was always meant to be—a realistic but romantic story of healthy adolescence set against the background of an average English Public School.

April, 1954.

Alec Waugh