ROUGH BOYS AND SMOOTH SIR,—Who'd be a children's author?
Because I write about the type of boys 'who go in for fighting and horse-play,' Miss Rosemary Thomp- son calls my Jim Starling's Holiday 'an unpleasant book. She seems to have some experience of child- ren—in the autobiographical sections of her review she mentions one or two of her own—so perhaps she could tell us if there are many boys of any other type. And what's all this about the Starling kind causing 'teachers to have nervous breakdowns?' I'm not a particularly phlegmatic person myself, but during the four years in which I taught such boys 1 didn't develop so much as a twitching cheek. What did sometimes tend to bring the teaching staff out in a rash was the sort of criticism of these kids that appeared from time to time in the local press: the yelps and sniffs of people who professed to detect the beating of a black heart behind every soiled tee-shirt and a howl of depravity in every high-spirited chi- yik e. Little did I know then that I should be meeting again the damp grey spirits of 'Disgusted,' Spare The Rod' and all the rest of the gang in—of all places —the literary columns of the Spectator! Tell me, sir when will you be getting 'Adsum' to do the leading political article?—Yours faithfully,
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