Diary

Christopher Turner

I first visited Summerhill, the ‘free’ school in Suffolk founded in 1921 by A.S. Neill, when I was an anthropology student. I asked whether I could stay for a while as a participant-observer, and was offered a large tepee as a place to sleep. I liked the idea of living in it: a wigwam seemed a suitable home for a backyard anthropologist. However, everything at Summerhill – where lessons are voluntary and the pupils invent their own laws – is put to a vote, and the children decided they wanted to keep the tepee for themselves. So for the summer of 1993 I lived in a bed and breakfast in Leiston. All the other guests worked for Sizewell B: every piece of crockery and all the towels and cutlery were stamped with the nuclear power station’s logo. The owner of the BampersandlandB had been given a free jumper after one of his own, hung out on the line, had tested dangerous during a random Geiger counter inspection.

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[*] A new biography of Reich, Wilhelm Reich: Psychoanalyst and Radical Naturalist by Robert Corrington, the first for twenty years, goes to great lengths to assert that he was ‘a genius of the highest order’ who never went insane (Farrar, Straus, 320 pp., $27, July 2003, 0 374 25002 2).