Because of the nature of those times, many of us were forced to consider carefully the constitution of the larger world within which we were living. The Cuban missile crisis is a vivid memory for all who wondered for twenty-four long hours in boarding schools many miles from home whether they would ever see their families again. Our parents’ tales of the days of the blitz and the buzzbombs and our acute consciousness of the possibility of nuclear holocaust made for a precarious sense of security at a time when it was most needed. So we were a generation with an acutely developed sense of mortality. Small wonder that protest became so dominant a motif for us.

But the broad political dimension manifest in widespread support for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Anti Apartheid Movement, for the independence of the old colonial nations was largely legitimised by the school establishment. Kenneth and Frances and several staff were, after all, active Quakers and pacifists and they had campaigned vigorously against war in the ‘20s and ‘30s. So there was little currency for would-be rebels at Wennington in opposition to the establishment through the wearing of CND badges and the dissemination of leaflets publicising marches and demonstrations.

So if one was impelled to oppose that establishment, other outlets had to be sought out. And they were easily found. For me the principal target was green corduroy shorts. I hated them with a passion and saw in them a symbol of repression that married ingeniously physical discomfort and personal humiliation. There was absolutely nothing that one could do with a pair of green corduroy shorts either to dilute their unique lumpy, pre-pubescent unattractiveness or to render them somehow stylish. All the boys at the local secondary school in Wetherby had to do to their terylene long trousers was take the bottoms in from 18 to 15 inches and lose the turnups. Even the sullen youths at the borstal next door had classy bib-and-brace overalls that make them look like convicts on a Mississippi county farm. It was always me that led the small party to the middle of the courtyard on an icy Yorkshire winter morning to take the temperature. If it was below freezing then we could wear longs and so share at least some aspect of day-to-day normality with the outside world. One of Kenneth’s reports grumbled that ‘Richard would rather spend the day standing around in longs than running around in shorts’. Which was true.

There was rich potential in another area for rebellion against tyranny and exploitation by the ruling class. Sex was a subject of such constant and intense scrutiny by the Barnes’ that it lost much of its forbidden glamour for us. ( Which is not to say that it wasn’t investigated comprehensively in both theory and practice - but that is another tale ). Drugs were known only to those of us who listened avidly to jazz and read Jack Kerouac, and – one abortive tealeaf smoking session apart – that knowledge was strictly theoretical. Which left only rock and roll. In the early ‘60s the first wave of testosteronal rock and roll had broken. Presley was in the army; Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran were dead; Cliff Richard already had his sights set on Housewife’s Choice and church on Sunday.

But in whatever diluted form it emerged, Kenneth loathed pop music. He viewed it not simply as sentimental tosh that debased the currency of relationships; he imbued it with almost diabolical significance, seeing it as an active force that sapped the vital energies of boys and girls, rendering them torpid and apathetic. And he drew no line between Cliff and The Shads and the jazz and blues beloved of Roger Gerhardt and, via him, of a small, dedicated group of pupils). For this genuinely liberal and enlightened Quaker, it was all the Devil’s Music. During the one or two grudging spins at an end-of-term dance permitted to Billy Fury’s latest, he would glower from the sidelines, focussing balefully on those degenerates who were clearly enjoying themselves the most. And as soon as musical health was restored in the form of Victor Sylvester or Jimmy Shand, he and Louis Jones would sweep onto the floor with girls in their arms to show us all how it should be done.

All of which meant that we aficionados of the jungle beat had to smuggle what passed in those days for portable radios down the woods for Saturday Club and Easybeat and under scratchy blankets at night for Radio Luxembourg and the American top twenty. Rock and roll became our music of resistance. We listened to it with all the avidity and defiance that French households listened to the BBC during the War. Our samizdat journals were Melody Maker and New Musical Express, sneaked in under cover of the morning papers, fetched from Wetherby by one of our couriers on a bike. And from time to time Roger – our man on the inside – would accidentally leave his Ferrograph tape recorder open in the French Room on a weekend. We would relax in the Gallic café ambiance, playing his recordings of cutting edge jazz by Charlie Mingus or Roland Kirk, imagining that we were out there in the ‘Big Bad World’ ( as it was universally and ironically known ).

Continued...