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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Christopher Turner’s Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America is forthcoming from HarperCollins in Britain and Farrar, Straus in the US.
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