A Blindefellows Chronicle

A Blindefellows Chronicle is a comic novel, comprising thirteen interconnected stories that take place over forty years. Its setting is Blindefellows, a second rate public school in the West Country, founded as a charity school for poor, blind boys, but long since converted into an 'elite' educational institution for anyone who can pay.
The novel runs chronologically from 1974 to 2014. In the first story 'The Fair Filles of France' we see the arrival of Sedgewick who starts his first teaching job at Blindefellows after an unsuccessful stint in shoe sales. Japes, who has been at Blindefellows for a few years following a career in the Royal Engineers, senses the younger man's inexperience and determines to help remedy it by taking him on the school's annual World Wars trip to France. Once they arrive in Bayeux, it quickly becomes apparent that the trip is a means for Japes to cavort with one of his many girlfriends.
Throughout the novel, Japes, an older chap, regularly attempts to imbue the younger Sedgewick with his worldly experience and takes it upon himself to introduce Sedgewick to womankind as a means of giving the naïve fellow some sort of fulfilling experience in life. He's repeatedly thwarted by the timorous Sedgewick, however, who throws his energies into his love of History as a means of sating his rather watery appetite. An unlikely hero through and through, Sedgewick repeatedly finds himself driven to save the day.