Few books have disturbed me as much as John Bridcut’s Britten’s Children, which is about to be published by Faber. Of course, the knowledge that Benjamin Britten, one of the 20th century’s greatest composers, had a penchant for the company of pretty teenage boys was never much of a secret. Even in the 1950s tongues were wagging in the musical world, despite strenuous efforts by Britten’s loyal Aldeburgh cronies to hush up his intimacies. As London choirboys in the mid-1960s, we certainly knew the rumours, just as we knew that certain male teachers could be relied on to patrol the changing-rooms assiduously when the third form was showering after rugby.

Bridcut has broached this subject before, in a fine TV documentary. But his book goes much further. Quoting extensively from Britten’s letters to his under-age boyfriends and their gushing missives back, it chronicles a 30-year stream of love affairs — the phrase is not too strong — between the composer and a dozen handsome pubescents.

The pattern was always the same. Britten would dazzle them with his charisma, ply them with treats, invite them on holiday, swim with them, hug them, sometimes share a bed. There is, one should say, no evidence that he went further. “Am I a lecher just because I enjoy the company of children?” he once spat at the conductor Charles Mackerras, after Mackerras had quipped that Britten’s Noye’s Fludde, with its big children’s chorus, was “Ben’s paradise”.

But then the chosen boy would cross a crucial line into manhood. It might be when his voice broke, or (in the case of his deepest infatuation, a German refugee called Wulff Scherchen) when he was called up for military service. At which point Britten would drop him with brutal callousness and find a new crush. He was particularly upset, perversely, when the boys subsequently got married, and never attended their weddings. Even so, most of th ose interviewed by Bridcut went on to enjoy happy, successful lives. They included the actor David Hemmings and Sir Humphrey Maud, who became a top diplomat. What’s more, they looked back without bitterness at their boyhood intimacy with the great composer.

Bridcut’s hypothesis is that Britten’s motivation for pursuing teenagers was never to procure sex. After all, for most of his adult life he was in a fulfilling homosexual relationship with Peter Pears. Rather, he was trapped in a Peter Pan syndrome. He had experienced the zenith of his own happiness in his last year at prep school, and was forever trying to re-create that carefree childhood state by forging associations with 13-year-old boys. Curiously, this wasn’t some middle-aged nostalgia thing. It began when he was as young as 19.

Of the evidence gathered to support this contention, nothing is more compelling than the revelation of a Letts Schoolboy Diary filled with details of the 13-year-old Britten’s personal measurements, bicycle number, school timetable, and so on. What’s odd about that? Well, it’s a diary for 1954. Britten was 40 when he filled it in.

All this will fuel the already intense speculation about the link between Britten’s life and his operas: works that display a pathological obsession with the theme of innocence corrupted. Perhaps we should queasily place these operas in the same morally questionable category as J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: indisputable masterpieces that were unfortunately sparked by their creators’ abnormal interest in children.

But Bridcut’s book, written in an impeccably unsensational tone, raises issues about the relationship between adults and children that go far beyond art. One is a realisation of how swiftly standards of propriety can change. Back in postwar England, Britten was far more likely to have been prosecuted for homosexual acts with another consenting adult (as cruelly happened to another British genius, the mathematician Alan Turing) than for his petting of schoolboys. In barely half a century the public’s attitude towards gay love has softened beyond recognition. By contrast, our attitude towards men who strike up affectionate relationships with children, even the platonic relationships apparently favoured by Britten, has hardened into zero-tolerance.

What Bridcut does, deliberately or not, is prod us into considering what we may be losing by adopting this hardline stance. Of course we may feel that, even by the relaxed standards of the time, Britten was allowed far too much leeway to play around with boys. (The parents of some of them belatedly realised this, and curtailed the relationships.) But has the pendulum swung too far the other way? Do men who would otherwise be superb, altruistic mentors of drifting or disaffected adolescents — as youth leaders, scoutmasters, teachers, sports coaches — now feel wary about showing any affection at all, lest it be wrongly interpreted? And isn’t it possible that this widespread suppression of man-to-child affection has an even more detrimental, hardening effect — on teenage boys especially — than an excess of affection would have had?

That’s what one part of me wants to ask. But then I open Bridcut’s book, and read correspondence between Britten and his boys couched in such foetid, creepy, infatuated language that I feel almost a physical revulsion. As I said, Britten’s Children is a disturbing book. I shall never listen to his Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra in quite the same way again.

They're revolting in the glens

Uproar north of the border. The Scottish Executive is apparently planning to ban pies and chips from pubs. In future, it seems, Scottish landlords renewing their licences will be required to submit “healthy eating” menus for political approval. What next? The vegetarian haggis? Alcohol-free scotch? A ban on headbutting in Glasgow on a Saturday night? It’s preposterous. Did generations of rampaging Morrisons pillage their way up the Butt of Lewis, only for my Scottish cousins to be instructed by some nannying Edinburgh busybody to lay off the deep-fried Mars bars? It’s time for Scots to reassert sovereignty over their own cholesterol levels, if nothing else.

Cashing in

According to the financial pages, British households have now run up a trillion pounds of debt. I’m sorry, but I just don’t believe it. I know my credit-card bill was big this month, but where did the other £999 billion come from?

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