Book description
The Honours Board
is set in an English Preparatory School for boys whose parents intend
them later to serve a four to five year stretch at a traditional English
Public School. But this brilliant novel is only incidentally about the
boys at Downs Park. Its major concern is with the men and women who form
the teaching staff - a small world as inward-looking as a 'family' of
hippies - and whose lives are intertwined not only with each other's but
with the moral and emotional tendrils, grown sturdy and gnarled over the
years, of this admirably conducted though less than typical bastion of
the English middle classes.
Downs Park is admirably conducted, but under the regime of its
sympathetic, intelligent, headmaster-owner, it loses more money than it
makes - nor does the honours board record scholarships to the great
public schools. It is, in fact, ripe for take-over, and the headmaster
knows it. The second master, self-regarding, plausibly ambitious, rich
and sexually athletic, knows it too. As this quiet but desperate
struggle reaches a critical stage, the whole structure of the group is
threatened and everyone is forced to look beyond the comforting bars of
his cage. In Pamela Hansford Johnson's masterly hands, this novel has
the force of life itself.
Pamela Hansford Johnson wrote 27 novels across genres as diverse as
romance, comedy and tragedy. An incredibly readable and literary author,
who deserves to be rediscovered by a new generation, Bello has brought
18 of Johnson's books back into print. Pamela Hansford Johnson was
born in 1912 and gained recognition with her first novel, This Bed Thy
Centre, published in 1935. She wrote 27 novels. Her themes centred on
the moral responsibility of the individual in their personal and social
relations. The fictional genres she used ranged from romantic comedy
(Night and Silence, Who Is Here) and high comedy (The Unspeakable
Skipton) to tragedy (The Holiday Friend) and the psychological study of
cruelty (An Error of Judgement). Her last novel, A Bonfire, was
published in the year of her death, 1981. She was a critic as well as a
novelist and wrote books on Thomas Wolfe and Ivy Compton-Burnett; Six
Proust Reconstructions (1958) confirmed her reputation as a leading
Proustian scholar. She also wrote a play, Corinth House (1954), a work
of social criticism arising out of the Moors Trial, On Iniquity (1967),
and a book of essays, Important to Me (1974). She received honorary
degrees from six universities and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of
Literature. She was awarded the C. B.E. in 1975. Pamela Hansford
Johnson, who had two children by her first marriage with journalist
Gordon Neil Stewart, later married C. P. Snow. Their son Philip was born
in 1952.
