Do come to me funeral

Mary Beard

• BuyDecca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford edited by Peter Sussman
  Weidenfeld, 744 pp, £25.00, November 2006, ISBN 0 297 60745 6

In 1934, one of the most disturbing aspects of the Red Menace and the creeping influence of Moscow – for the Daily Mail at least – was a public school magazine called Out of Bounds. Written and produced by a group of wealthy, disaffected teenagers, it was a mixture of political polemic, reviews of left-wing books and adolescent anxiety. There were articles on the arms race and on Fascism (a member of the Oundle School Fascist Youth Group, who wrote that the ultimate aim of Fascism was ‘Liberty, Justice and Tranquillity’, proved a sitting target for the magazine’s editor, who mused on ‘the Liberty of the Concentration Camp, the Justice of the Jewish Pogrom, the Tranquillity of Imperialist War’). But probably more popular with most readers were the complaints about corporal punishment, compulsory OTC and the restrictive rules of girls’ schools, as well as the upbeat reassurances about masturbation. In the fourth and final issue, ‘a doctor’ wrote to dispel the myths propagated by teachers on this subject: ‘some form of auto-eroticism is absolutely inevitable except in a person with complete sexual anaesthesia, a very rare psychological condition.’ This ‘doctor’ was presumably one of the young editors.