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as he called himself, began at the Hall when stars of the ideological firmament were frequenting there more than ever. He was Straight’s age, and they were thrown together, according to Young, because of Dorothy’s propensity to find permanent playmates for her children.
    Young loved the freedom after a succession of preparatory and state schools in London and Australia, where straps and canes were used on hands, knuckles, legs, and buttocks. He was amused by the mixed-sex showers, which Leonard had suggested would take the curiosity out of the youngsters and reduce sexual tensions. “I had found it had the opposite effect,” Young noted in interviews.
    As for the unisex dormitories, a worry in his five years at the Hall was the prospect of pregnancies. “There were surprisingly few compared to other schools,” he observed, “but it wasn’t for want of trying.”
    Young had not long been at Dartington when he became fascinated by the new panacea that was Marxism. It was fashionable among thinkers at the leading universities. Both boys were inspired by a desire to change the world through revolution. Their isolation in the Dartington educational milieu assisted their precocious development. They were at least aware that their inspirations were radical and a threat to the establishment, even the liberal, democratic views of Dorothy and Leonard. It forced them into a bond, an early adolescent cabal, which, despite their intellectual equality, Straight appeared to dominate.
    “He was arrogant and could be cruel,” Michael Young recalled. 1 “He was extrovert and I, introvert.” He remembered them being “more rivals than friends,” although they remained friends through that original bond into their 80s.
    Teachers at Dartington noted that Straight was difficult, uncooperative, and rude. Wyatt Rawson, trying out his newly discovered Freudian analysis, found Straight to be “tremendously under the influence of an English governess [the redoubtable May Gardner], who kept his emotions arrested at an age of about five.”
    Straight used to repeat this amateur observation over the decades in an attempt to show that he was in need of being attached to somebody or something—that he was vulnerable to his later recruitment to a secret cause. On a 1929 trip with his parents to Bengal to see Tagore, he found his stepfather (here in a diary entry dropping the affectionate nickname “Gerry” for Leonard) remote and Dorothy naive. Straight seemed to be painting her as not the best mother a sensitive lad could have. This added to the image of a poor little rich boy who needed that sense of belonging once more. Thus he was later open to being fostered in the communist cause. Added to this was his professed alienation in the United Kingdom since leaving the United States, which was again to propose that he had no true motherland. He was implying that when another was later offered, he was attracted.
    An alleged example of parental guidance, or lack of it, concerned a play that his mother put on at Dartington when he was 13, Le Tombeau Sous l’Arc de Triomphe by Paul Regnal. Its central character was a French soldier who volunteered for a suicide mission. He was given twenty-four hours to be with his father and his betrothed. Straight claimed to Dorothy that he did not understand the soldier’s mentality. If he was the top fighter, why did he have to sacrifice himself? Dorothy cut him off by implying he was ignorant. Then she pointed out that the soldier’s status caused him to be obligated to make the sacrifice.
    Straight claimed, unconvincingly, that this all related back to his agony over his father’s desire to abandon his family and go off to war. Dorothy never went beyond the explanation that the top man should lead the way in sacrifice. Straight said this befuddled him. The impression he wished to convey was that he had developed a deep sense of noblesse oblige, after the example set by his father and upheld by his