Post-war Britain

Not every human culture leaves clear and legible accounts of itself. Here we have a comparatively recent way of life which we know thousands of men led. It was proscribed, and those who lived within it had good reasons to conceal their participation and nature, usually taking care not to leave any records. Invisible and, even at this short distance, impossible completely to understand, the culture of male homosexuals in London was only partially legalised in 1967. Before that has to be interpreted through material which is intrinsically unsatisfactory. A comparison might be drawn to the textual means historians have of understanding another proscribed culture, the early Christians in Rome.

For fans of Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s unique blend of high comedy and shrewd social observation, a new book is cause to leap on to the nearest chair and emit several loud shrieks. Jobs for the Girls is the third in the author’s trilogy on ‘lost worlds of Britain’. These are recent, touchable lost worlds, she stresses in her introduction, ‘still in living memory’, as recalled vividly – and often hilariously – by people who were there in her earlier books, Terms and Conditions, about life in girls’ boarding schools, and British Summertime Begins, on what children from all walks of life got up to in the school holidays. Jobs for