ABSTRACT
His older brother was killed by a speeding motor car soon after John won a scholarship to a fee-paying grammar school, and he struggled to respond to his parents’ grief. He felt isolated among the middle-class pupils until the General Strike brought the school’s few working-class boys together. One of them took John to Friends Hall, a Quaker educational settlement, where a charismatic Christian Socialist, Fred Parsons, liberated him from Baptist fundamentalism. He started enjoying school and getting good marks until the headmaster recommended to John’s mother that her son jump a year to matriculate early so as to take the pressure off the family finances.
