BOOK REVIEW
Happiness Moments of Ben Tudor (Year 12) Wodehouse’s School Days:
J an Piggott’s detailed examination of Wodehouse’s school days sets out to connect the childhood of the Old Alleynian author with the themes of his earliest work. Published to celebrate the quatercentenary of the school’s foundation, it certainly accomplishes its aim, and it is perhaps apt that it concerns a man who must have been one of Dulwich College’s most fervent celebrators. The first half of the book is filled with Piggott’s excellent research (facilitated by the College’s own archives) into the biographical details of Wodehouse’s time at Dulwich. The most striking feature is perhaps how unhappy a childhood it was in many regards. Wodehouse was sent away at a shockingly young age to horrific Edwardian prep schools by parents who lived in Hong Kong and whom he almost never saw after he left China when he was just two. So it is not difficult to see why he found comfort in what became almost literally his ‘alma mater’. Despite not being academically exceptional, Wodehouse maintained a loyalty to Dulwich for the rest of his life that has occasionally bordered on obsession. He considered his time at Dulwich to be his happiest years – indeed, as he said to a school friend 50 years after he left, ‘To me, the years between 1896 and 1900 seem so like heaven that I feel that everything since has been an anti-climax’. This is perhaps owed to the fact that, denied a place at university by his father, he was pressed into a dull job at the Hong Kong and Shanghai bank that he hated immediately after he left school.
During his time at Dulwich, Wodehouse contributed fully to the life of the school, as a keen cricketer, rugby player, boxer, musician and editor of The Alleynian . It is no wonder, then, that his early writing took his love for English public school life and transposed it into fiction, the concern of the second half of Jan Piggott’s book. What followed were seven volumes of school stories, all set at a thinly disguised fictionalised version of Dulwich College (dubbed variously St. Austin’s, Wrykyn, Beckford, Sedleigh and Eckleton). These were very successful and launched Wodehouse’s career as a writer. Their central themes were matters of school loyalty, schoolboy moral decisions and what Piggott calls ‘the public school spirit’. In A Prefect’s Uncle , for example, the most shocking insult imaginable in Wodehouse’s world is ‘All I can say is that you are not fit to be at a public school’. Interestingly, these fictionalised schools progressively became ‘posher’ than Dulwich was when Wodehouse was a pupil, perhaps because of Wodehouse’s increasingly nostalgic view of his own school days. Their subjects range from comic schoolboy exploits to more serious moral dilemmas. For example, in An International Affair, the boys’ traditions are challenged when a new cut-price tea shop is set up in Dulwich Village, offering ‘public school tea at one shilling’, and putting their former tea shop out of business. The champion foils this dastardly plot by spiking the tea of his schoolmates at the new shop with sal ammoniac, stolen from the school labs. In his analysis of Psmith In The City , Piggott identifies the
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