In May 1976, aged fourteen and a half, during my first year at Sedbergh School, I came across a small paperback called ‘He and She’ by Kenneth C. Barnes. First published in 1958, it already belonged to another era. Barnes himself had been born in 1903 and by 1930 was Senior Science Master at Bedales School. He wrote from a world shaped before the First World War, yet he was attempting to guide teenagers entering the permissive decades of the 1950s and 1960s.
I cannot now remember how the book came into my hands. Perhaps we were encouraged to read it. Perhaps I found it in the School Chapel bookshop, or buried in the House library between forgotten adventure novels and mouldering rugby annuals. I doubt I read it cover to cover. But enough of it lodged in my mind that fifty years later I can still hear its tone: earnest, intelligent, apologetic, faintly embarrassed, occasionally perceptive and, even then, slightly old-fashioned and often wrong.
What fascinates me now is not so much what Barnes intended, but what a boy like me may make of it.
Some passages sounded almost liberating. Barnes repeatedly insisted that young people must learn for themselves:
“Young people have to go their own way, learn their own lessons from their own mistakes.”
“Each situation is new, and you have to use your own judgement.”
For a boarding school boy living within endless systems of rules, hierarchy and restraint, that language mattered. Much of school life felt imposed from above: when to wake, when to work, what to wear, how to behave, what counted as success. Self-control was preached constantly. Yet among boys, many rules felt less like moral truths than obstacles to dodge creatively. Getting away with something often made it more pleasurable.
Barnes, perhaps unintentionally, gave moral authority to independent judgment. He repeatedly admitted he might be wrong. He suggested future generations would think differently. That uncertainty probably appealed to me more than certainty would have done.
At fourteen, I was not looking for biological explanations so much as a framework. My parents’ marriage had collapsed. Even then, I suspected they had not truly known each other before marrying and having children. Barnes’s insistence that friendship, patience and understanding should precede intimacy may have resonated because I already feared making similar mistakes.
At the same time, some of the book’s warnings must have worked on me in exactly the opposite way intended. I believed in the intimacy of body and mind.
Barnes writes of “the sought-after girl who is not properly looked after at home and is therefore loose and uncontrolled in her behaviour.” Even in 1976, the sentence carried the stale smell of the 1950s: class anxiety, fear of female sexuality, the assumption that girls required supervision. Yet to a teenage boy, the phrase did not sound cautionary. It sounded like guidance – if there’s one thing you’re after, then there’s one kind of girl you need to seek out!
The unconventional girl.
The emotionally neglected girl.
The girl outside ordinary rules.
Perhaps because I, too, came from a broken home, I may have imagined such girls as freer, more exploratory, more willing to discover life for themselves. In later years, versions of this girl would repeatedly appear in my fiction.
Barnes also approached sexuality psychologically rather than merely mechanically. His “stowaway below decks” metaphor — the hidden self steering us unconsciously — now reads like a simplified fusion of Freud and Jung. At the time, I probably translated it more crudely into the schoolboy expression: don’t be ruled by your dick rather than your unconscious, your inner devil. Yet the deeper idea stayed with me: that human beings contain hidden drives which cannot simply be suppressed but must somehow be understood.
That notion fascinated me.
By then, I already lived heavily inside my imagination. My diaries show someone trying to become a person through experience: through girls, style, ambition, fantasy futures, intellectual curiosity and emotional intensity. Barnes suggested that desire itself was part of that process of becoming.
What strikes me now is how innocent and naïve my understanding still was. It never occurred to me that sex might differ greatly between different couples. In my teenage mind, it could resemble squash or tennis: a physical activity one improved through practice. “Sexercise,” almost. Mutual pleasure seemed natural enough. Or like animals mating – you can’t help yourself.
Boys and girls, I increasingly suspected, were more alike than different. Biology nudged us one way or another during foetal development, but emotionally we were fellow travellers trying to understand the same urges and confusions.
Barnes’s famous comparison — “having sex is like a trip to France” — now sounds unintentionally comic. Yet perhaps that too lodged somewhere deep in me. France represented sophistication, freedom, difference, and exploration. You had to go there to discover what made it unlike home. I cannot help but wonder whether this absurd analogy somehow intertwined itself with my lifelong affection for France.
Reading the book never felt illicit. I was its target audience, albeit at the younger end. By 1976, Britain had already shifted significantly from the moral climate Barnes originally wrote for. The sexual revolution had happened, even if parents, schools and institutions still lagged behind it uneasily. Among boys at school, we talked openly enough about girlfriends, kissing, attraction, and desire, though not necessarily intelligently. Branston claimed he loved his girlfriend more than his mother — a statement I found genuinely shocking. Thumper had a girlfriend, too; I remember drawing her portrait from a photograph. I had girls in my orbit as well: friends, acquaintances, pen pals, girls I had kissed experimentally and mutually, partly to discover what all the fuss was about, often under the amused observation of others who seemed to treat us as demonstrations from which they too might learn.
What Barnes perhaps understood better than many modern discussions is that adolescence is not simply about sex. It is about projection, loneliness, identity and freedom. He warned that young people project fantasies onto real people rather than seeing them as they truly are. He was right about that. At fourteen, one is often in love less with a person than with possibility itself.
Fifty years later, I suspect that was what I was really searching for in He and She: not instruction, but permission to imagine myself entering adulthood; to believe desire, confusion, longing and experimentation were part of becoming someone real.
The following are direct quotes.
Young people have to go their own way, learn their own lessons from their own mistakes.
This makes sense. It lets each generation figure it out for themselves. They’re not working in a vacuum; certain urges are natural, and there is inertia, to a lesser or greater degree, between generations.
Each situation is new, and you have to use your own judgement.
This also makes sense. Times change, people are so different, and the kind of matches and mismatches we try to make are hugely varied.
The good experience leaves no guilt; it is supremely satisfying; it can be thought of afterwards with a sensual relish, yet as having given something deep and lasting to one’s life.
This would inspire me.
Part of family life … and getting to know each other.
It is a fact that some boys do experience sexual intercourse while they are still at school, perhaps through having found the sought-after girl who is not properly looked after at home and is therefore loose and uncontrolled in her behaviour. p48
Was there any truth in this? Parents cannot take all the blame. Or should they? The kids of divorced parents got up to more. Why? Because they had the opportunity, because they were no longer closely supervised, or because it would have been hypocritical for parents to be overly judgmental about something they themselves were doing?
The struggle that results from having to postpone sex experience until long after we first wanted it as part of the process that makes us into a person, the process I have already described, in which we are conscious of loneliness, but out of which we can emerge with strength and maturity and with something to give. p.71
He’s justifying his behaviour and expecting others, thirty years after he was in this position, to do the same.
By implication, patience and developing friendships come first, and then most likely marriage, before greater sexual intimacy.
He constantly advocates for postponing or resisting intimacy until long after a close friendship has been established and ideally within marriage.
If two young people shouldn’t become sexually intimate, then it is most important that they should avoid a situation in which nature takes charge and impels them towards mating.
The male has a strong impulse to put his penis inside a female, and she has a strong desire that he should do so. p.89
That’s useful to know! If I ever worried that I was randier than the girl, then this set me straight. The reality is that her desire may not be as strong as his.
The awful danger the young face is projecting their romantic wishes onto real people, so they see them as they would like them to be, not as they really are.
We liked the idea of being in love so much that we slipped into role-play; the foundation of our love is wishful thinking.
Some of the most wholesome and clean-minded girls can find themselves in awkward situations because men mistake their innocence for a come-on. Some girls have to be taught modesty. p.118
If the boys and girls are the same age, does that matter? They can figure it out. The problem is that an older, more experienced lover is taking advantage of the situation.
What you should always do is to wait, proceed gently and patiently, until there are unmistakable signs that you want, until conscious desires emerge on which you can proceed confidently and responsibly. p.120
Having sex is like a trip to France!
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