On my first day at Thornleigh, in 1971, I found this book in my desk - published 75 years ago this week... the Salesians couldn't wait to begin our anti-communist education aged 11. But it was a gift really .... 1/ 
2/ My Dad - a truck driver who left school at 14 - explained to me that it was an allegory of the Russian revolution and showed that not all communists were as bad as capitalists, only the Soviet government (who'd invaded Czechoslovakia 3 years before)...
3/ Then a sixth former on the school bus gave away the ending, explaining that (spoiler alert!) the pigs ended just as corrupt as the men, but that this didn't necessarily mean capitalism was OK...
4/ To be fair, there must have been some subversive liberation theologists among the SDB because I remember lively discussions about the Vietnamese revolution (ongoing), Mao (still in power) as we ploughed through the chapters...
5/ And Animal Farm is a brilliant narrative. I was genuinely shocked at what happened: the duplicity, mendacity - and it was very easy to read the novel not as a critique of communism but of the school and its religious heirarchies...
6/ Plus in the school library there was The Communist Manifesto with the infamous intro by AJP Taylor, which by the age of (?13) during the 3-day week strikes we were able to see was rubbish, and the Manifesto itself visionary...
7/ So thanks to @PenguinUKBooks and to the Salesians of Don Bosco for putting it in my desk, and Dad, and my schoolfriends & teachers for all the discussions about Marx, Stalinism, Vietnam War, Prague Spring etc that formed our real education in the 70s...
8/ And to the miners who put out the lights so we had to read by torchlight. And to Orwell.
