Back to school... at the age of 54!

ACOUPLE of friends and I confessed we had squirrelled away our children’s old school blazers. We couldn’t bear to part with these symbols of their childhood. Then we talked about our own school uniforms. I liked mine. I liked it so much that ever since I’ve almost always owned a grey tweed overcoat similar to the one on the school list. A detail that would no doubt pique a psychiatrist’s interest.

School uniform and school life in general are very British obsessions. And surely the strangest tale of the week was that concerning Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s wartime minister of information and the founder of the Financial Times, pictured. He was elevated to the peerage in 1952.

Lord Bracken – at the age of 54 – set up a summer school on the Scottish isle of Scalpay. Posing as a teenage pupil called Mike with a premature ageing condition, he demanded regular canings from the prefects for crimes such as smoking and drinking. This extraordinary story appears in a memoir called Minstrel Heart written by David Campbell, now 85 and a distinguished BBC producer who was one of Bracken’s duped friends.

Eventually “Mike” was outed as a fraud and the closed in 1957.

There is a photograph of Bracken and Campbell, both in shorts and long socks. Bracken is obviously a man in late middle age but he had produced dozens of forged letters attesting to his “condition” and was believed.

Campbell said that though there was “clearly an element of masochism” in Bracken’s desire to be beaten (you don’t say!) he never showed any sexual interest in the other boys. His main delight was in “the manufacture of drama”.

But he had pulled the schoolboy trick before.

Born in Ireland in 1901 he was the son of a builder with Republican sympathies. When his mother was widowed she sent the adolescent tearaway Brendan to Australia to live with a cousin.at the age of 19, Bracken was back in Britain. Claiming to be 15 and orphaned in a bush fire he persuaded the headmaster of

school the Sedbergh School in Cumbria to give him a place. Equipped with a public school background, Bracken was able to make his move into publishing and then politics.

Maybe we would all secretly like to go back to school, to start again and re-invent ourselves as someone completely different. Brendan Bracken returned to his starting point as a 15-year-old schoolboy twice in his life.

He liked wearing uniform and he liked being caned. It’s a run-of-the-mill fetish. But maybe his true desire was to imagine a fresh beginning in which ageing played no part.

The idea that your school days are the “happiest days of your life” is rarely accurate. But they are the days when your unmapped future lies before you and anything is possible. Which reminds me – I must take my tweed coat to the dry cleaners before the start of the autumn term.