By R.F. Delderfield was published in 1974. It is the first fiction book that I have read in a while. Fiction can often give us more insights into the world than non-fiction and that is certainly the case with this semi-autobiographical, historical fiction novel. The book starts during the latter years of WWI and follows the life of David Powlett-Jones, a shell shocked WWI veteran who finds work as a history teacher at a private boys school in rural England. The book gives a good picture of post WWI England and mixes in the politics and history of the 1920's and 1930's.
The book gives especially truthful and candid insight into the life of being a teacher. Even as a public high school teacher in America, I found that I had more in common with the problems of early 20th century private boarding school teachers than not. Things just haven't changed so much. Delderfield especially captured the current mood of our country on following the curriculum carefully and basing everything on test scores, as opposed to actual great teaching, which sometimes and most times isn't the same thing. I would recommend this book to every teacher, everyone who might want to teach and anyone who wants to understand schools and teachers better. Obviously, Delderfield had been a teacher himself, his descriptions of the relationships between the teachers, the teachers and the students and the teachers and the administrators was dead on! Finally, for my pure history fanatics, there is plenty of real history in this book to make it worth your time and presented with the background of an interesting story.
