The Dog in the Chapel

The summer of 1962 was one in which nothing seemed to happen. Or rather, it was the summer before everything happened. The Cuban missile crisis was still three months away, the death of Kennedy a full year off. That next year would see the Beatles’ first string of number one records, the first TV appearance of the Daleks, and the start of That Was The Week That Was. The Second Vatican Council would not publish its deliberations until three years later, and homosexuality would not be legal in Britain until two years after that. But it is not true that, as Philip Larkin wrote, sex began only in 1963. This is the tragic-comic story of two young men, one aged twenty-one, the other eighteen, who fell in love during that previous summer, but who had the misfortune to be working as teachers in a Catholic preparatory school at the time.

The tragic-comic story of two young men, aged 21 and 18, who fall in love in the summer of 1962, but who have the misfortune to be working as teachers in a Catholic preparatory school at the time. Their names are Tom and Christopher. In the opposite corner to them stands Father Louis, the elderly headmaster. It is his conviction that the sixties will go down in history as the decade which sees the earthly triumph of the Catholic Church. Life becomes more complicated for Tom and Christopher when Miss O’Deere, the art mistress, decides to paint the pair as David and Jonathan and to enter the result in a public exhibition… To say nothing of the inconvenient attentions paid to them by 13-year-old Angelo Dexter.

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