BOOK REVIEW
story as an expression of Wodehouse’s ‘profound love’ for Dulwich College. Mike is forced to leave ‘Wrykin’ (Dulwich) and as he says his last goodbye, ‘a few took him to the railing which bounded the College grounds. It was late August, and the evening had begun to close in. The cricket fields looked very cool and spacious in the dim light, with the school buildings looming vague and shadowy through the light mist. The little gate by the railway bridge was not locked. He went in and walked slowly across the turf towards the big clump of trees which marked the division between the cricket and football fields … they brought home to him with a cutting distinctness the absolute finality of his break with the old order of things’. Participation in manly sports (particularly cricket and boxing) is valued over academic success in the school stories. For example, in The White Feather , a boy’s loyalty to his school is brought into question after he refuses to join in a fight with locals and is subsequently ‘cut by everybody. The fellows thought I had let the house down and it got about … so I had rather a rotten time’. He makes amends for this perceived betrayal by taking covert boxing lessons and winning an inter-school competition. Piggott’s most interesting comment on these stories seems to me to highlight their link to Wodehouse’s ‘arrested development’, in which he became obsessed with an idea of Dulwich from which he never quite moved on. Despite not being academically exceptional, Wodehousemaintained a loyalty to Dulwich for the rest of his life that has occasionally bordered on obsession As Piggott points out, the stories never progress from the tribalism of public schools – unlike some school stories, there is no reference to serving one’s family, their country or the world – just very narrowly the honour of their school. The relevance of this to the ignominy of Wodehouse’s behaviour during the Second World War seems stark and sad. His self-professed lack of interest in real politics ended up with him essentially betraying his country by broadcasting comic radio shows from Berlin whilst interned in comparative luxury at the Adlon Hotel. It is poignant that his tragic lack of judgement (which the book refuses to skim over) meant that he was unable to transfer to his country the loyalty he had shown to his school. After the war, Wodehouse
Wodehouse at Dulwich
never returned to his native land and never saw his school again, an exile that exacerbates the unfortunate rootlessness of his life story. Again, it is not surprising that Wodehouse was the chief orchestrator of parties for Old Alleynians during his time in New York, or that every copy of The Alleynian was delivered to him overseas. Wodehouse professed his regret for his actions in an apologia for publication in The Alleynian . He wrote, ‘I can see now, of course, how idiotic it was of me to do such a thing and I naturally regret it very much, but at the time it never struck me that I was doing anything wrong’. Overall, Piggott’s book makes it profoundly clear that Dulwich provided Wodehouse with some of the only true moments of happiness in his life: moments which formed the moral compass with which he would write his most famous works.
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