Goodbye to All That

By Timothy Foote

THE HONOURS BOARD by Pamela Hansford Johnson. 316 pages. Scribners. $6.95.

For literature at least, it is a blessing that the British Labor Party has not yet succeeded in doing away with that bastion of upper-class pain and privilege, the British public school. From Thomas Hughes to Kipling and Orwell, from Harold Nicolson to Robert Graves and Anthony Powell, a succession of British men of letters have devastatingly recollected in tranquillity the fagging and the field sports, the pleasures of playing up and the dark night of a sensitive soul fallen among rugger-bugger philistines.

Pamela Hansford Johnson, in real life the wife of C.P. Snow, can hardly be described as an old boy. Still, she has contrived a remarkably deft version of a peculiarly masculine genre. Downs Park is a prep school--a staging area from which very little boys can go on to the public schools. Perhaps predictably, the school's most gifted master turns out to be a thoughtful, non-U escapee from a technical college. Yet academic cliches and characters alike flash into brief, tantalizing existence, in part because the author talks about them in a tone of voice which hovers suggestively between satiric irony and compassion.

What really sets this miniature exercise apart, though, is Pamela Hansford Johnson's perception of a sad pedagogical truth. Any good school is a delicately balanced work of civilization as febrile and vulnerable as a colony of hummingbirds. The private vice of a matron, the loss of a particularly gifted student, the departure of even one fond teacher can alter it decisively--for the worse.

-Timothy Foofe

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