The two nightmares of male adolescence — up to the 1950s — were a “dose” (ie, venereal disease) and the “club” (ie, “pudding club” — your girl getting pregnant.) Two pills, antibiotic and contraceptive, abolished those calamities, allowing the 1960s to swing more freely towards other problems.
The poet Edward Thomas, as an undergraduate, was unlucky on both scores. He caught VD from an Oxford trollop having earlier got himself shotgunned into premature marriage. The twin calamities skewed his whole life.
Although he brings with him a whiff of hedge and hayfield, Thomas was born, solidly middle-class, in 1878 in the “greenless” streets of late Victorian London. A townie. The Thomas family house was so crowded with brothers (six of them) that any one son