PENGUIN BOOKS
Molesworth
Geoffrey Willans, author of Down With Skool, How to be Topp, Whizz for Atomms and Back in the Jug Agane, was born and educated in England, and spent time not only as a tiny pupil but also as an extremely perceptive schoolmaster. After active service during the Second World War he joined the BBC as a feature writer. His writing appeared frequently in publications like Punch, Lilliput and Blackwoods before his untimely death in 1958, at the age of 47.
Ronald Searle was born in Cambridge in 1920 and was educated there at the Cambridge School of Art. On the outbreak of the Second World War he left his studies to serve in the Royal Engineers and in 1942 was captured by the Japanese at Singapore, then held by them for three and a half years. He is a hugely successful graphic artist and pictorial satirist. As well as his collaboration with Geoffrey Willans on the Molesworth books and his invention of St Trinians, his work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions across the world and appears in several major American and European collections. He moved to Paris in 1961 and then, in 1975, to a remote village in Haute-Provence, where he still lives.
Philip Hensher was born in 1965, in London, where he now lives. He is the author of three novels, Other Lulus (1994, Penguin 1995), Kitchen Venom (1996, Penguin 1997), which won the Somerset Maugham Award, and Pleasured (1998), as well as a collection of short stories, The Bedroom of the Mister’s Wife (1999) and the libretto to Thomas Ades’s opera, Powder Her Face. He is a regular critic and columnist for the Spectator, the Independent and the Mail on Sunday.
GEOFFREY WILLANS
AND RONALD SEARLE
Molesworth
with an Introduction by Philip Hensher
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Down with Skool! first published by Max Parrish and Co. Ltd 1953
How to be Topp first published by Max Parrish and Co. Ltd 1954
Whizz for Atomms first published by Max Parrish and Co. Ltd 1956
Back in the Jug Agane first published by Max Parrish and Co. Ltd 1959
Published collectively as Molesworth in Penguin Books 1999
Reprinted in Penguin Classics 2000
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Copyright © Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle, 1953, 1954, 1956, 1959
Introduction copyright © Philip Hensher, 1999
All rights reserved
The diaries of Molesworth first appeared in Punch
The moral right of the author of the introduction has been asserted
EISBN: 978–0–141–90404–7
Contents
Introduction by Philip Hensher
Down with Skool!
How to be Topp
Whizz for Atomms
Back in the Jug Agane
Introduction
The other day, a former Conservative cabinet minister was being sent to prison, for doing whatever it is that former cabinet ministers do. Asked by the newspapers how he expected to cope with all the misery and deprivation, he answered, ‘I’m sure I will cope. I lived through Eton.’
Which just goes to show that future historians of the English mind would do very well, when they look at the post-war period, to look beyond the established canon of the existentialists and the neo-romantics and the Angry Young Men and the weedy English offshoots of the Nouveau Roman, and look at the four great books which you are now lucky enough to hold in your hand. Whether he knew it or not, the Conservative cabinet minister was quoting Grabber, the head boy of St Custard’s, winner of the mrs joyful prize for rafia work, the Flashman of the age whose future is foreseen by the hero, Nigel Molesworth, not just omniscient but briefly prescient, as a descent into vandalism, crime and a life of unfulfilled opportunity. For returning to the scenes of his youthful glories and expressing the opinions that ‘LATIN IS SOPPY. MATHS ARE MAD. FRENCH IS FRITEFUL. ALG IS AWFUL. WOODWORK IS WET. THE FOOD COULD DO WITH IMPROVEMENT.’ Grabber is sent to prison. And, like the Conservative cabinet minister, he says ‘he do not care so boo there is no difrence between st.custard’s and wormwood scrubs anyway.’ Back in the jug again, as one might say.
The setting is a preparatory school, somewhere in England in the early 1950s, called St Custards. The headmaster is Grimes; the head boy is Grabber. Like many other classic English works of the late 1940s and 1950s – Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan cycle, the morbid comedies of the brilliant ‘angry young men’ of the novel, Keith Waterhouse, Kingsley Amis, Johns Wain and Braine – the tetralogy explores a single disaffected mind within a depressing and faintly gothic social setting, and views everything through his eyes. The narrator is not, therefore, a school hero, and this is a very long way from the clean-cut school fantasies which entertained England before the advent of the atomic bomb. Rather, he is a classically post-war cynic called Nigel Molesworth, lurking in the depths of class 3B; he has a younger brother (‘Molesworth 2’) and a ‘grate frend’ called Peason. His family are lightly, devastatingly sketched in – a mother and father, their depressing friends and depressing daughters (Cicely, already a beauty), a grim grandmother addicted to complaining about sausages in shops, and a grimmer chorus of bribing uncles. But the action largely revolves around the appalling school. There are other masters, such as Sigismond the mad maths master, and several other boys, such as Gillibrand, first depicted striking an unconvincing pose on the highest diving board. And there is the unforgettable Fotherington-Thomas, ‘uterly wet and a sissy’, who habitually talks to the trees and the sky. Molesworth’s great strength as a narrator is that nothing escapes him, and nothing distracts him from his universal cynicism; his weakness, as you will shortly discover, is that he is quite unable to spell.
The Molesworth tetralogy is one of those works of sublime genius which no reader will ever forget; more than that, it gives one a prism through which to view the world. Many readers will have had the experience of being asked their opinion of some newly fashionable work of deplorable pretentiousness, and found Molesworth’s somewhat double-edged opinion of Colin Wilson – ‘advanced, forthright, signifficant’ – rising to their lips; or perhaps, on meeting a new acquaintance, they have been reminded of a single member of the richly Theophrastan gallery of characters, of Basil Fotherington-Tomas, Ian Gillibrand the general’s son, or even Sigismond the mad maths master. Sometimes, a near-stranger in adult life will remark, quite casually, à propos of nothing much, that ‘Nearer and nearer crept the ghastly THING (p. 230)’, or that a pianist’s somewhat vague rendering of the Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jesus reminded him of nothing so much as Molesworth 2’s account of Fairy Bells, or quite simply, ‘The prunes are revolting’. You gaze at your interlocutor. A fit of unanticipated joy and recognition shoots across the mind. And a dinner party, otherwise entirely non-Molesworthophile, is completely ruined as a pair of addicts greet each other with all the annihilating fervour of two long-separated, kindred wolfhounds.
Other classics, I admit, have something of this quality. People who can bear the sickening Bright Young Things whi
msy are prone to liken their acquaintance to those thick stuffed animals in A. A. Milne; others to the less extensive and more sexually ambiguous cast of The Wind in the Willows, so long as they can forget about all that fondling between Mole and Ratty and that frightful hairy Pan at Dawn’s Gates. Or, rather more bearably, to the steely tastelessness of Hilaire Belloc’s cautionary tales, George’s house collapsing into the street below, which happened to be Savile Row. But none, I think, has the richness, depth and range of these four books, which present even quite young readers with a splendidly realized and vivid cast, an unstoppable satirical verve, and a startling width of cultural, political and philosophical range. You can never rely on Molesworth not to start joking about Proust, trade unions, the Welfare State or Stalin’s show trials. They are sublimely clever books, and we are right to call them modern classics.
They reflect their period, which is that of the fifteen or so years after the second world war, thoroughly, and gloriously. You know that when the grownups give up trying to read A Christmas Carol to the tinies, they have a jolly good whine about the government and the unspeakable rate of income tax. You have a very good idea that Grabber’s parents (‘cor strike a lite’) did very well indeed out of the war, and it is not altogether wise to be too cautious about them. And despite the irresistible cynicism of the books, they seem like the product of an optimistic and a happy time.
Happier and more optimistic than ours, at any rate. The prospects which excite Molesworth have, one by one, been discredited. The space race faltered when the Treasuries of the world started to ask who was going to pay for this. Fotherington-Tomas, I fear, did not die as gloriously as Molesworth foresaw, but still lives with his sister Arabella in the ‘cotage called swete lavender,’ and perhaps – one likes to think so – still says hello to the trees and the sky, on a Sunday afternoon. Perhaps Molesworth still calls on them, though he is unlikely still to shout ‘open, in the name of Beelzebub’; Molesworth, who is no longer the young Elizabethan, thrilled by the notion of atomic energy in Whizz for Atomms. Like all of us, he is by now an old Elizabethan, who read the details of the royal divorces in the better newspapers, and thinks only of Chernobyl when he hears the words ‘nuclear energy’. Or perhaps he did what he foresaw, and went into couture; he would have been both a pillar of Swinging London, forestalling Courréges with space-age plastic miniskirts, and a formidable rival to Vivienne Westwood at the height of aristocratic punk.
Peason, I am very much afraid, went into insurance and, not quite understanding why, went down with Lloyds. That glorious vignette, the Cad with the ancestral conker and the grandmother who is the Duchess of Blank, hem hem, is now the Duke, and penniless, thanks to Peason’s uselessness, and wondering what on earth he is going to do when the House of Lords is handed over to the plebs. And Grabber – well, we know about Grabber – he was in the newspapers the other day, and, even in the benign regime of an open prison, the mrs joyful prize for rafia work starts to seem a very long time ago. Perhaps even St Custard’s is still there, running on a rule of less Latin, prunes, Fairy Bells and botany walks (‘I don’t think that would find its place in the nature museum it is so very dead’), and much more media studies, music appreciation, dance and drama. Grimes and the cane (‘can be thrown for the dog to fetch in the holidays’) have gone; the master who said ‘This is not going to hurt me as much as it hurts you’ is facing charges, and the school, I expect, is under the wavering thumb of the boy master depicted on p. 29 telling his class that they may consider him ‘soft, but I’m hard, damned hard’. ‘Noone hav ever found a way of avoiding history it is upon us and around us all,’ as Molesworth reflects. ‘The only thing when you look at the cuning vilaninous faces in our class you wonder if history may not soon be worse than ever.’
I read these books when I was quite young, probably no more than ten or eleven. Much of the satire passed straight over my head – I had no more idea than Grimes whether a book called Swann’s Way by Proust (‘grate fr. writer’) might exist or not, and only had the vaguest idea, if that, who Rimsky-Korsakov, Gabbitas and Thring or Kruschev were. Many of the satirical targets must have seemed remote or incomprehensible to me; the densely illustrated books we learnt French from were very different from sailor-suited Armand and his elephants, there was no question whatever of learning Latin, which looms so large in these pages, or stuffing away at getting poetry off by heart. Most incredible to me now is the idea that I barely understood that St Custard’s was a private school, and when Molesworth talked about the oiks whose schools had been so markedly improving recently, he was talking about people like me, at a state school, playing with the school plutonium plant and sipping orange juice with Ermintrude at break – I love Ermintrude, who crops up several times, and want to know so much more about her.
And yet the intellectual atmosphere of the books was immediately clear; I thought they were children’s books, when I was a child, and now that I am an adult, think they are books for adults about childhood. Childhood favourites have a way of growing a thick layer of whimsy in later years, but these are as funny as they were, and have developed a ferocious satirical bite, and an alarmingly sophisticated line in psychology – if you doubt that, just look at the thumbnail sketches of the varieties of parents and masters on pp. 28 and 90. They are not about school, nor about childhood, but about England, viewed from an innocent and endlessly surprising standpoint. I would give Lucky Jim and Look Back in Anger and Room at the Top rolled into one for another scene like the great half a page in which Fotherington-Tomas and Molesworth discuss existentialist philosophy on the football pitch; I would give the works of every Angry Young Man extant for a fifth volume of Molesworth. If you want to understand what the Festival of Britain really meant, what social class used to mean and what happened when the ancien régime hit the Welfare State head-on, you could do a lot worse than turn to Back in the Jug Agane. And I’m not quite joking.
They started as a sequel, and, as rarely happens, surpassed their original. Ronald Searle had had a great success with his St Trinians drawings of a disreputable boarding school for girls, which gripped the general imagination to the point that they were turned into films, and a collaborative romance with D. B. Wyndham Lewis, The Terror of St Trinians. The Molesworth pieces began as an attempt to do something similar for a boys’ school, initially commissioned as a series of articles for Punch. From the beginning, the Molesworth idea was very different to St Trinians, as may be seen if one looks at the extremely funny and light-hearted scenes about imagined girls’ schools – the pastiche of the girls-school story as Molesworth cheats by stuffing reptiles down his shirt in the botany exam, the real glimpse of a girls’ school which follows, and, best of all, Arabella Fotherington-Tomas’s school song;
Ho for bat Ho for ball
Ho for hockey and lax and all
miss dennis is strict,
miss hamilton fair
But miss peabody (gym) is both strict and tall.
Unlike the earlier project, Molesworth was a collaboration between equals, a happy partnership between quite different temperaments. Willans had worked as a schoolmaster, and understood the cheerful cynicism of boys, their willingness to pursue an old joke to the point of mania, or say the last thing one expects. Searle’s inimitable and unforgettable style was black, Gothic and seething with half-hidden obsessions. It looks, at first sight, somewhat rococo, like the work of his French contemporary Philippe Jullian, but the more you look at it, the more it seems to make its elaborate psychological points through concise and economic observation. The ‘Masters at a Glance’ page in Down With Skool! is a wonderful example, a little masterpiece of effortless variety and wit; just look at the inventiveness with which he represents the masters’ hair. Searle had spent much of the war in a Japanese concentration camp, a subject he would take years to come to explore in his art, and it would not be too much to wonder whether those half-comic, half-dreadful figures of authority and sadism are beginning to expunge some inner demons.
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This black undertow need not trouble the reader. Some of the St Trinian’s drawings, it is true, are disturbingly, though fascinatingly full of cruelty and sexual tension (all those voluptuous sixth-formers with their instruments of torture). Here, there is a wonderful deft lightness of touch which keeps the dreadful bullies, the bored and sadistic masters with their novel ear-tweaking, head-shaving punishments as a joke while not diminishing the very real Gothic terrors of childhood. It will not do to stress this aspect of St Custards, and when Molesworth is talking about the cane, the sadism of masters, the elaborate physical punishments, it remains a very funny joke, more of a comment about the authoritarian temperament of middle-class England than an angry protest against physical abuse. But I remember, as a boy, being unnerved, if not frightened, by some, of Searle’s drawings – the single-hair extraction, the Scotch Caber (for senior boys), the parents putting their tiny children onto the St Custard’s train, and the master who is glimpsed saying, ‘Your psycho-analyst may say one thing, Blatworthy, but I say another. And my treatment is free.’ The cruelty is there, and cannot quite be dismissed; I knew, as a child, that it was funny, but could not dismiss the thought that these things would at some point happen to me. And that is still, more or less, what I think when I look at them.
The articles were a great success, and were collected into three books before Geoffrey Willans’s early death in 1958. A fourth, posthumous volume shows no lessening of quality. Willans was involved in writing for the British film industry, and his non-Molesworth novels are well worth reading, though now somewhat difficult to find. All the same, his lasting monument is Molesworth.
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