The Prunes Are Revolting

In Slightly Foxed, No. 17, I wrote of my childhood addiction to Anthony Buckeridge’s stories about Jennings and Darbyshire, pupils at the agreeable but not very realistic prep school of Linbury Court. That obsession ended abruptly when, in the late 1950s, I was myself plunged into prep-school life, and a very different school filled my imagination.

GRIMES stand on the platform, smiling horribly at the pitiable colection of oiks, snekes, cads, oafs and dirty roters below. ‘Welcome back,’ he snarl, ‘Welcome back to st. custards for a new term. I hope you had a good hols? I did myself – spane, the s. of france, then on for a couple of weeks to the italian riviera. This term of course the fees will be higher to meet the mounting costs.’ But this evidence of good humour is short lived. Without warning he bare his fangs. ‘Now listen, scum,’ he yell, ‘The last mum hav departed in tears. You are in my clutches agane and there is no escape.’

The book in which it appeared was titled Back in the Jug Agane and purported to be the latest instalment of the no-holds-barred, first-person memoirs of a dyslexic 11-year-old called Nigel Molesworth, pupil at St Custard’s prep school. We real-life prep-school boys loved every aspect of the Molesworth saga, with its brutal disregard for grammar and spelling, its scorching invective and ink-splattered, gothic-horror pictures. The books served, too, as an accessibly mordant glimpse into the grown-up world, for Molesworth was at least half an adult, with a knowledge of class, culture and psychology well ahead of ours, and an underlying view of politics that was satisfyingly subversive. We revelled in the sharpness of these books without necessarily grasping the detail or reach of their satire. Born in 1911 their author, Geoffrey Willans, was of the same generation as Anthony Buckeridge. He had been – of course – a prep-school boy and subsequently, in the 1930s, a master; but, like Buckeridge again, he wanted to write and was good enough at it to have two novels published before war service in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. Then, during convoy escort duties in the North Atlantic, he distracted himself from the danger by turning out comic pieces for Punch, of which the most popular were ‘The Diary of Nigel Molesworth’, which gave him a main character, a setting and a rich fund of ideas for his subsequent post-war collaboration with the cartoonist Ronald Searle – the Molesworth saga. Willans was much less well known than his illustrator, so the first title, Down with Skool, was issued in 1953 under both their names, and so were each of the others: How to be Topp, Whizz for Atomms and Back in the Jug Agane. This co-authorship is quite just, since Searle’s splotchy pen complements Willans’s sardonic imagination perfectly. The artist’s reputation had blossomed from his own earlier best-selling invention, the girl’s school St Trinian’s. But he’d wearied of turning out these collections of sleazy gym-slip humour for the Christmas market. Willans’s Molesworth promised to be much more interesting. Some of Searle’s Molesworth drawings are one-joke cartoons in the manner of the St Trinian’s work. But even better are his graphic responses to Willans’s text – the rogue’s galleries of masters, parents and pupils, and the inspired visualizations of such fantasies as ‘Scenes in the Life of Pythagoras’, ‘The Revolt of the Prunes’ and ‘The Private Life of the Gerund’. Immediately after completing Back in the Jug Agane in 1958, Willans died, leaving the Molesworth series in the state in which we have it today: a 1950s tetralogy of comic genius. To anyone who had previously enjoyed the gentle ride given by Anthony Buckeridge, Willans’s narrative is a wrenching change of gear. He flips the moral world of Linbury Court upside-down so that, instead of the freshfaced, good-looking, eager-to-please Jennings, we have as our hero ‘the goriller of 2b’. Molesworth has small, cunning, close-set eyes, hair infested by parasites and a jam doughnut of a nose. He is a coward, a fantasist tormented by delusions of grandeur, an artful dodger and a cynic to rival Shakespeare’s Thersites. The people around him are no prettier. Jennings’s best friend Darbyshire is a gentle, easily frightened klutz, but the little we have from Molesworth on ‘my grate frend Peason’ includes the information that he is ‘foul looking’, a pathological liar, a fearless cigarette smuggler and ‘from time to time he uters wolfish cries’. And in place of Linbury Court’s supporting cast of Temple, Venables and Bromwich Major, Willans gives us the fatuously effeminate Fotherington-Thomas, a wealthy head boy, Grabber, who behaves as his name implies, and Molesworth 2, a lesser life-form. Compared to the essential niceness and dedication of Linbury Court’s staff, those stalking the corridors of St Custard’s are monstrously incompetent time-servers, the staffroom a den of vice and the classroom a theatre of cruelty. Willans catches perfectly the distorting angle of a child’s view of his teachers.

Some are thin, some have got an enormous pot on them some smoke cigs some smoke pipes poo gosh which ponk like anything and nearly ALL hav a face like a squashed tomato . . . The job of masters is supposed to be to teach boys . . . Aktually most of them prefer BEER and PUBS.

Meanwhile, if Linbury Court’s headmaster Pemberton-Oakes is benignly lazy, Grimes is diabolically driven:

0900: Drive boys and masters into class. Lock them in. Take latin class qui quaue quod stoke boiler peel potatoes more latin quibus quibus quibus rush out to garden to pick sprouts mend puncture and answer leters. 1000: Break. Milk buns boys for the kane. 1015: Drive in boys and masters agane lay table clean silver feed hens teach 3a more latin. Romans v. benevenuti. Treble chance pool forum packed. 1300: lunch stew and prunes eat with relish. 1330: eat secret lunch smoked salmon duck green peas strubres and cream . . .

Willans fractures his narrative into a crazy-paving of forms – diary fragments, lists, memoirs, playlets, captions, verses, flights of fancy and, running throughout, a satirical torrent of Molesworthian consciousness that marauds across the 1950s in order, as he writes, to ‘explane why Britain is what it is toda’. This is the line to quote to anyone foolish enough to think these books are nothing but jolly examples of zany but comforting period humour, like The Goon Show. Molesworth’s jokes and distortions are often very Goon-like. Yet a taproot of solid truth feeds the absurdity of St Custard’s. The prep-school method of education, still being applied into the 1960s, had been invented in the high Victorian era. The aim was to catch boys before puberty and imprint them with the ideal manliness of a public-school entrant and, ultimately, of an officer class for the nation and the empire. The curriculum was heavily ideological, often spilling over into indoctrination. Early proponents of the prep school defined three essential principles: preparation of the pupil for adolescence and adulthood, separation from females and older boys, and rustication, to keep wider society at a distance and provide daily doses of healthy fresh air. St Custard’s meets all three criteria with exuberance, as it does another, about which the theorists were less forthcoming: flagellation, to maintain discipline. Grimes is an enthusiast for corporal punishment, as is clear from the opening sentence of Down with Skool: ‘Headmasters are always very ferce and keep thousands of KANES chiz, mone, drone. With these they hound and persecute all boys.’ Molesworth gives a poignant description of one such thrashing – the trembling arrival in the Head’s study, his preliminary ‘pi-jaw’ while the victim stares dumbly at the titles in the bookshelf, the easy-chair for bending over, the pungent smell of the chair-cushions, and then ‘the Kane descend whack gosh oo gosh oo gosh’. Not only is St Custard’s faithful to the structure of a 1950s prep school, it preserves the incidental details: the food (those prunes), curricular essentials (Pythagoras, the Gallic Wars, ‘foopball’ matches against neighbouring Porridge Court), the boys’ reading habits (Bulldog Drummond), teachers’ pernickety speech-patterns and their underlying insecurity, the colourless letters home (‘the truth was so shoking and unspekable that no parent could stand it’). The more outrageous eccentricities of St Custard’s may have outstripped any possible reality, but you can never be absolutely sure. In Whizz for Atomms we hear of the jellied eel and whelk stall that Grimes runs as a sideline. Arthur Marshall, in his Whimpering in the Rhododendrons: The Splendours and Miseries of the English Prep School (1982), tells of one seaside school whose head ‘opened up a factory at the end of the promenade for potted shrimps, which he sold to the public’. And when a St Custard’s reprobate is sentenced to ‘half an hour in the automatic caning machine’, there is a weird precedent in Pocock’s Steam-driven Schoolboy Beating Machine, invented according to Marshall in 1854 by an uncle of the cricketer Dr W. G. Grace. With a trouserless boy in place, this could be set according to the desired number and severity of the strokes. The user then sat back to enjoy the show. The St Custard’s curriculum is by any standards extremely restricted, yet it is exactly that of a traditional prep school. After classics, the most important subjects were mathematics, history and team sports. Science was often ridiculed or completely overlooked. Classical language and history (the decadent bits tactfully excised) were placed first because they were thought to give an essential grounding in the qualities appropriate to the home-and-colonial administrator: public-spiritedness (the model, Athens), self-denial (Sparta), militarism (Rome) and honour (Troy). Willans, however, knew that many boys found it hard to see the point:

Sir? Be quiet molesworth! Get on with your exercise. No sir really sir. Well, what is it? (Thinks: a possible trap?) Then you sa: What is the use of latin sir? Master clutches the board ruber but he knos he is beaten this one always rouses the mob. The class breaks into an uproar with boos catcalls and cries of ‘Answer!’ The master begin er well er thats er quite simple molesworth latin is er classicks you kno and er classicks are – well they are er – they are the studies of the ancient people. SIR NIGEL MOLESWORTH Q.C. So what?

Molesworth here relishes his fantasy of being a charismatic barrister lording it over the courtroom/classroom, but he has to admit in the end that ‘it never really happens like that. You hav to listen to the same old stuff about latin giving you depth and background.’ On only one occasion does Molesworth take pleasure in a lesson and this, significantly, is when a young American exchange teacher, Ed Hickenhopper, appears on the scene. He introduces a novel element into the classroom by organizing the boys ‘into a task force to solve a quadratick equation . . . and we rather enjoyed it – wot am I saing ENJOYED it? Curses CURSES. Reshake the cocktail, peason, and don’t drown the gin.’ This is Willans, in 1956, quietly signalling the revolution in teaching methods that would gain real purchase only a decade later. It would be one of the factors that killed off the St Custard’s kind of prep school. In the meantime, Molesworth compensates for the inadequacy of his schooling through tireless advocacy of self-help (by cheating if at all possible). The second of the books is entitled How to be Topp, the third is subtitled A guide to survival in the twentieth century, and the whole quartet is peppered with patent short cuts to educational or social success. In a decade during which the cult of Teach Yourself books reached its zenith, this is a very 1950s obsession. The famous parable of ‘The Revolt of the Prunes’ has the same contemporary relevance, but with a broader, sharper political edge. When it appeared in Down with Skool, uprisings against British colonial rule – in Egypt and, far more bloodily, in Kenya – were making lurid headlines. Using tactics not unlike the Mau-Mau, the prunes carry out a high-level murder (the Headmaster) and then retreat to skirmish in the countryside. Eventually the revolt is mopped up in a determined attack led by Molesworth. In this episode stereotypes of empire abound. The prunes beat their war-drums; the chief prune ‘had a lot of relations and appointed them all staff prunes’; the battle that follows is fought incompetently on both sides, but in the end the rebels are wiped out to the last prune. Thus is the prep-school boy’s original destiny as colonial policeman, or District Commissioner, lived out amidst the brutal extinction of a tribe of comic-book natives. When you think about it, this Milliganesque humour is not very humorous at all. In ‘The Revolt’ our hero becomes the symbol of reaction, though he is just as liable elsewhere to cast himself as a resistance leader. It is never easy to categorize Molesworth. He is a lord of misrule, a trickster and a shape-changer. The cliché ‘we laughed like a drain’ seems completely appropriate to our response when my friends and I first read the books at school. As an adult my response is more complex, compounded of my memories of actual school life and a lifetime of other reading. Now Molesworth seems to me, like Falstaff, to stand as one of the great comic monsters of literature – a national disgrace, but also a national hero, a liar and simultaneously a truth-teller. As a person, you would have to say that he is despicable and altogether worthless; but, as a character, he is a literary treasure.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 21 © Robin Blake 2009