Geoffrey Gore, educator and inventor, was brought up in an English country schoolhouse in the early years of the twentieth century. His childhood was overshadowed by tension in his parents' marriage. William Gore, a widower, had married a woman twenty years his junior. When they lost their first child, Constance became over-protective of her surviving son Geoffrey and made him her partner in lifelong conflict with her husband.

Both parents possessed considerable strength of character. William, born in 1853, remained very much a man of the nineteenth century. Constance was already married...