Younger Fogey
Sir: John Wain was not the first to use the term `Young Fogey' (Letters, 26 May). Dornford Yates's Maiden Stakes, published in 1928, opens with Adam Boleyn, wounded 12 years earlier in the Great War, examining his own character:
' ... I did not seem to have been made to enjoy the post-war world. Fashions, outlook, the spirit and manners of the age — I found the lot beyond me. To condemn them would have been presumptuous. I merely deplored the fact that I could not adapt myself to their demands. The dance of life had altered, and I could not master the steps. So I had withdrawn from the struggle and gone back to what was left of the old highways which people used to tread before the War, passing along them soberly and for the most part alone, and occasionally wondering whether, after all, the sniper had not known better than the surgeons who saved my life.
`I was a young fogey.'
He spends much of the book undergoing extraordinary hardships, in order to avoid compromising his female travelling companion by sleeping in the same hotel.
John Whittingdale
6b Weatherby Mansions, Earl's Court Square, London SW5
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