 |
|
Volume 2 in the novel sequence SONS OF THE MORNING
by Simon Watson.
The Head Master of Worthington College announces one day that the school – a traditional boys’ public school – is to admit girls. Johnny Clarke, last seen as head boy of his prep school, The Dell, in A STORM OF CHERRIES, is now in the Lower Sixth at Worthington and he and his friends are not at all sure that they welcome this news. Of course girls are ‘a good thing’ but this is a dramatic change in the character of the school and they are soon turned against it by the appointment of an unpopular master, Mr Burkinshaw (The Burk), to introduce coeducation and be the girls’ housemaster. Then at the traditional annual ‘Dance Against St Agnes’ Johnny falls in love and from then on, supported by his friend Angus, he has thoughts only for his beloved Jane. But fate will have it that a skeleton in the Burk’s cupboard, exposeed by another friend, Nick, looks like having an unthinkable connection to Jane, a connection that threatens to bring Johnny’s romantic happiness crashing to the ground. At the end of the story something does indeed come crashing to the ground but it is not Johnny’s happiness, or Jane’s.Set in the early sixties, when ‘pop music’ still meant Elvis, DANCING DAYS celebrates the experience of young love. It also evokes the nature of public school life of the period: all boarding, all boys, all work and games and chapel and CCF. This was the way things were and therefore the way things should be. But wasn’t there perhaps something outside those cloisters waiting to be discovered by its innocent inmates: new harmonies, new feelings, new tastes – a new world, in fact?
Popular praise for Dancing Days
‘Dancing Days brilliantly, and entertainingly, captures the combination of innocence and sophistication that is the essence of privileged youth, and recalls with romantic accuracy a time not long gone, gentler and more measured, yet as full of emotional turmoil as today.' Tim Rice.
|
