seventeen: a diary of the teens by a boy

Seventeen: A Diary of the Teens by a Boy (Aubrey Fowkes) (Fortune Press, no date [1940])

This is the penultimate  (I think) in a long series of diaries published anonymously by Fortune Press in the 40s and 50s.  Aubrey Fowkes, their alleged author, is 17 in 1918, and this volume chronicles about six months, from June through December–his summer holidays and his last term at public school, during which his invalid father dies and the First World War ends.  I had read several of the first (chronologically) diaries, when Fowkes is a very young schoolboy, developing his fascination with bums, lavatories, homoerotic roughhousing, and corporal punishment.

At 17, he has outgrown none of this obsessions and has aged into the role of aggressor and user, alternatively torturing and coddling his fags (or, in the local parlance, “ticks”).  He also has crushes and passions for boys his own age, and describes all these varied relationships in exhaustive and (fairly) graphic detail.  His passionate yet unconsummated friendship with a young farmworker during the summer holiday is especially poignantly described, along with his relationships with his mother, father, older brother, and school masters.

Aubrey is a complex, interesting, self-aware and observant narrator.  He has a great eye for detail and ear for dialogue.  The final days of both his father and the War are movingly evoked, and his mixed feelings about leaving school–and childhood–are complexly and engagingly rendered.  This is a book of surprising humanity and depth–far realer and more honest and compelling  than Peter Waring (see below).