Review of Boarding School

As a British teenager back in the 60s, it was hard work finding material to fuel your erotic fantasies - Britain was still fairly tightly buttoned up. However, as the 60s became more swinging, so the laces loosened, initially with the written word. Penguin books had kicked things off in the 50s with the DH Lawrence novel Lady Chatterly's Lover, of course. Gradually there was a move away from literary material which was sexually oriented (Lady Chatterly, A Cold Wind In August etc.) to books which were targeted towards erotic entertainment rather than serious literature. Passion Flower Hotel by Rosalind Erskine ( pseudonym for Roger Erskine) was a case in point. It was a saucy, lightly humorous novel about a group of boarding school girls who set themselves up as a rather tentative brothel for the benefit of the local boarding school boys (a different, neighbouring school). This, for a 60s adolescent lad who had not not joined the Permissive Society, was pretty spicy stuff. My copy became dog eared, and took to falling open at certain pages.

I encountered this movie late one night on TV and it was well under way when I thought "Hello! This is Passion Flower Hotel!" Although the adaptation is distinctly European (the book is very English), the story is pretty much the same.

Don't expect this film to be sexually lurid. There is some nudity, the plot is driven by sex, but there is an air of innocence about the girls' enterprise and also the movie itself. These were simpler times, and by being set even further back in time, the innocence is amplified. It is mildly erotic, pretty to look at, gently entertaining, and rather charming in its own understated manner.

And, for me, it brings back very welcome memories of the book.