Age of innocence?
From Mrs Sam Jettubreck
Sir: Having lived in the same street for many years and seen the area gradually taken over by feral youths, I wonder what Peter J.M. Wayne might suggest I do to stem the rising tide of crime in my street? ‘These are children …for goodness sake,’ wrote Wayne in his review of David Fraser’s A Land Fit for Criminals (Books, 17 June). So that makes their vile insults, burglary and aggression to the community acceptable? When a 14-year-old boy next throws a brick at my windows, and smashes glass in the nearby park so that my grandchildren cut their feet, or when next I am confronted, taunted, spat at or abused, I’ll just remember their age, shall I? Is that supposed to console me?
Mrs Sam Jettubreck
London W6
From Jim Trimmer
Sir: Everybody but Peter J.M. Wayne seems to be agreed that we need more prison places to keep people who would otherwise do us harm out of circulation for longer. However, it is a massively expensive business. So why not do as the NHS does and outsource? There must be plenty of developing countries whose costs are a fraction of our own that would welcome the opportunity to earn some hard currency. This is not deportation but sub-contracting, and, unlike the Americans’ secret gulag, these establishments would be subject to agreed minimum standards and open to periodic inspection.
Foreign nationals and others without established family connections here could easily serve their sentences overseas. A Jamaican drug-dealer would surely think twice before risking another five years’ chokey in, say, Uzbekistan.
Jim Trimmer
Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey
Do mention the war
From Oliver Berlau
Sir: Dan Hannan is, of course, right in saying that the subject of the Civil War was close to a taboo in the first decades after the transition (‘Ghosts of the Spanish Civil War’, 17 June). My wife, who’s from northern Valencia, showed me her secondary school history book — not even a full page was dedicated to the war. But I do not agree with Mr Hannan when he writes that the subject should best be forgotten. There has to be an open discussion about the Civil War. Without it, both sides will cling to versions of history where either the brave and noble defenders of the true faith defeated the communist monster, or the brave and noble defenders of a democratically elected government were defeated by the fascist monster.
Oliver Berlau
Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey
Bring back Assisted Places
From Elizabeth Baker
Sir: In his letter of 10 June, the headmaster of Harrow School records the academic excellence of direct grant schools together with the benefits they offer to the socially disadvantaged. Social mobility is the norm. He suggests that David Cameron, resiling from the reintroduction of grammar schools, could consider how such schools could be strengthened and developed.
While he’s about it, the leader of the opposition could also deliberate on reviving the Assisted Places scheme, phased out from May 1997. Means-tested grants allowed many clever but poor pupils to attend private schools, both day and boarding. In the day school where I was head, 90 of nearly 600 pupils were in receipt of some help (together with many others with bursaries and scholarships). We thus ensured a full social and ethnic mix, the inclusivity beloved of our present government.
Elizabeth Baker
Usk, Monmouthshire
Krupp and friends
From Sara Moore
Sir: Frank Johnson’s delightful review of my book How Hitler Came to Power (Books, 17 June) contained two inaccuracies. First, it was Krupp and friends who were actively giving Stalin help with the modernisation of his armaments in 1932 (not the Nazis). Second, although the pan-German newspaper magnate and politician Alfred Hugenberg may have given Hitler cash, there is little evidence that others gave him large sums.
In 1928 Hugenberg maintained that people could be persuaded to vote for a dictatorship akin to Mussolini’s ‘if the condition of the country seems to warrant it’. My book asserts that the rich and powerful pan-German leadership did its best to create the sort of abject economic conditions which persuaded the people to vote for Hitler. Krupp’s deal with Stalin, under which the German communists always voted for the Right instead of the Social Democrats in those desperate times, also helped.
Sara Moore
By email
Sad to be gay?
From Alistair Cooke
Sir: In scorning the gay rights movement Paul Johnson (And another thing, 17 June) repeats the tired old refrain that homosexuals lead sad lives because of the intolerable burden of their lusts. One of his examples, Kenneth Williams, was certainly a stranger to joy, but there is no lack of heterosexual actors who have led tortured and despairing sex lives. As to the other, A.E. Housman, a brilliant professor of Latin at Cambridge (not Oxford) as well as a famous poet, he may well have been perfectly content to love without sex, like A.C. Benson, Master of Magdalene, Cambridge, and others of that repressed generation. Enoch Powell, one of his students, found himself ‘gripped by the spectacle of the rigorous intellect’ and ‘suppressed emotion’. The DNB tells us that ‘his sensitiveness was indeed acute and made him so reserved that most people found his company difficult’ — clearly not a man ever likely to have found fulfilment in the gay dives of Tangier. Exuberant homosexuals without intellectual complications are not hard to discover. One of Johnson’s favourite diarists, Chips Channon, would help him rethink his bleak and misleading thesis.
Alistair Cooke
London SW1
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