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Sparkling, sinister, occasionally comic and often moving, The Fool of Love describes the quest of a schoolboy for love and affection against the background of an almost deserted country house during the First World War.
15 year old Rupert Fiennes-Templeton is an only child. His perpetually unfaithful father left for France in 1914 with the Grenadier Guards, and his mother has devoted herself to hospital work. Home for the holidays, Rupert meets a German prisoner of war working in the kitchen garden. The boy is intrigued, fascinated and finally bewitched by the enigmatic Ernst.
Swiftly Rupert discovers how fragile are the conventions of his small world; how narrow and naive his outlook. As the story unfolds, convenience masquerades as affection, loyalty is rarely returned, hatred withers before friendship, and love proves impervious and destructive.
Widely praised as a diarist and biographer, James Lees-Milne has conjured up in his third novel an unforgettable portrait of country house life, a vivid array of characters from above and below stairs, and an intense and dramatic story.
Quote: In view of this studied dimness and detachment from the school ethos, it is curious that, in his third year at Eton, Jim became a favourite of his House Captain, Julian Hall, a handsome hero who was a member of the privileged Eton Society or ‘Pop’. (He later became a minor literary figure, and succeeded to a baronetcy). A decade later, in 1933, Hall published a school novel entitled The Senior Commoner, in which the hero, Harold Weir, is obviously autobiographical, and one of the lesser characters, Jim Marsh Downe, is obviously based on Jim Lees-Milne (even to the fact that his mother is an old schoolfriend of the housemaster’s wife, Mrs. McIsaacs). Weir takes a liking to Marsh Downe, ‘the only younger boy with whom he had any relationship’. Marsh Downe is ‘tall for his age, with clear skin and light hair’, and rather foppish, tucking a silk handkerchief into the sleeve of his coat. …[1] [An asterisked note adds:] This would seem to be an authentic account of the fifteen-year-old Jim at Eton. … The portrait is acknowledged as being true to life in Jim’s diary for 16 June 1973, and in letters from Hall among Jim’s papers at Yale.]
For a 1930s novel, The Senior Commoner is daringly homosexual: part of the plot concerns a sinister young actor who visits ‘Ayrton’, with a view to seducing boys there (based on an actual episode in which the American actress Tallulah Bankhead attempted to lure Eton boys to a nearby hotel until warned off by the police). Hall was himself homosexual in adult life, and one might ask to what extent his interest in Jim was sexual. In the novel, Harold Weir has a ‘crush’ not on Marsh Downe but on a still younger boy called Murray Gawthorne — feelings which he confides to Marsh Downe, who himself fancies Gawthorne, a house contemporary of his younger brother. This brother is presumably based on Dick Lees-Milne, who entered McNeile’s [their house at Eton] two years after Jim; and Gawthorne is probably based on Dick’s contemporary Desmond Parsons (himself the younger brother of Michael [6th Earl of] Rosse, a senior boy in McNeile’s and a contemporary of Hall): the blond and languorous Desmond was one of the most beautiful boys at the school and had numerous admirers, not least Jim himself.
If Julian Hall enjoyed physical intimacy with Jim, he was not the first to do so. In his diary for 3 June 1991 Jim noted the announcement in The Times of the death of one Lieutenant-Colonel Berkeley Villiers,
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