My
investigation of Rudyard Kipling's early life has stirred up memories
of two good books about life in boys' schools, one of them written by
Kipling himself:
Stalky
& Co. by Rudyard Kipling
The
Compleet Molesworth by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle.
The Molesworth books are much lighter than the Stalky stories; they are greatly enhanced by Ronald Searle's cartoons.
Rudyard Kipling is a great writer; Ronald Searle is a great illustrator.
Both books are very funny; they have brought great enjoyment to large
numbers of people. I am very glad that I read them when I was young
enough for them to make an indelible impression.
Reading
in childhood
Children
may read to escape, to fill gaps in their lives, to exercise their
imaginations, to learn directly and indirectly and for enjoyment;
whatever the cause, they may remember what they read for the rest of
their lives.
Ayn
Rand for example read a story in a magazine in 1914, when she was nine years old. Her biographer Barbara Brandon managed to locate a copy of the
magazine in 1982, and discovered that Ayn, who had recounted the
story to her at considerable length, had remembered almost every detail,
both major and minor, of this work that she had not read since the
age of nine.
As a small boy in Southsea, Rudyard Kipling escaped from his unbearable life by reading. He never forgot some of the stories and poems that he read in books and magazines during this time. He wrote about them and his efforts to identify some of them in Something of Myself.
I can remember most of what I read as a child very vividly. Some of it
was buried for many years but it was still all there, including these two books about school life. They have their critics. They may seem dated, irrelevant and politically very incorrect, but they are part of my life and I feel privileged to have read them.
About Stalky
& Co.
After
Rudyard Kipling was taken away from the House of Desolation, he had a
nine-month holiday. He was then sent to the United Services College,
a boarding school for boys at the seaside village of Westward Ho! in
Devon. He entered the college in January 1878, and left in July 1882
to take up a job as a journalist in India.
The
Stalky stories are a fictionalised account of his life at the USC. One of the three main characters is called 'Beetle'; he is based on
Kipling himself. The main attraction for me is the way these
characters outwit and take revenge on their masters and other boys in
story after story. I love to read about clever, mischievous schoolboys.
I
find these tales witty, amusing and sometimes hysterically funny. They are also very informative about school life in the 1870s.
A postcard from 1881 addressed to Kipling at the USC:
Stalky & Co. 1899 first edition:
The
Compleet Molesworth
This
is a collection of four books:
Down
with Skool! A Guide to School Life for Tiny Pupils and their
Parents (1953)
How
to be Topp: A Guide to Sukcess for Tiny Pupils, Including All There
is to Kno about Space (1954)
Whizz
for Atomms : A Guide to Survival in the 20th Century for Fellow
Pupils, their Doting Maters, Pompous Paters and Any Others who are
Interested (1956)
Back
in the Jug Agane (1959)
These books are written by fictional character Nigel Molesworth, a 1950s prep school boy who misspells everything and shares his opinions, insights, daydreams, wisdom and advice about life, the universe and everything, St. Custard's School in particular.
One of Molesworth's expressions - “as any fule kno” - has become part of the English
language!
An
extract of interest from Stalky & Co.
This
is from the story Slaves of the Lamp. Not, in my opinion, the best
and funniest of the collection – An Unsavoury Interlude wins the
prize – but containing a paragraph of particular interest:
"The
Lower Third had set a guard upon their form-room for the space of a
full hour, which to a boy is a lifetime. Now they were busy with
their Saturday evening businesses--cooking sparrows over the gas with
rusty nibs; brewing unholy drinks in gallipots; skinning moles with
pocket-knives; attending to paper trays full of silkworms, or
discussing the iniquities of their elders with a freedom, fluency,
and point that would have amazed their parents."
What
I like about this description of the evening activities of the
younger boys is that Molesworth would feel very much at home in that
environment, even though he was at school more than 70 years later.
A
few pictures from the Molesworth books
One
of the characters in the Molesworth books is a boy called Basil
Fotherington Thomas. He is a goody-goody; he is a wet and a weed and
a girly. He has curly blond locks and skips around the school saying, "Hullo clouds, hullo sky".
Here
we have Basil F-T, Molesworth having a classical daydream and
Molesworth's depictions of the Masters at St. Custard's School:
"Pythagoras
puzzled by one of my theorems"
The
two books today
Both
books are still in print, with many different editions available.
Stalky & Co. can be read online on Project Gutenberg, but a real book with good
illustrations is the best way to read it.
Molesworth
is now a Penguin Modern Classic.
Anyone
who wants to know more can find many relevant articles, reviews and
images online.
I
can't imagine what these books would look like to people who first
encounter them as adults. Maybe they would dislike them, find them
difficult to understand and wonder what the all the fuss was about.
Perhaps the books would be seen as describing an alien lifestyle, as
science fiction almost. The books are very British, so maybe they
would not appeal very much to Americans.
As
critics at the time noticed, Stalky & Co. contains some cruelty,
sadism even. The bullying, brutality and savagery may put people
off. The schoolboy slang, the many Latin and Biblical references and
quotations from writers such as Surtees many not mean much to many
people now.
Molesworth's
humour may seem childish and unfunny to the new readers of today.
Even
so, people who love these books always recommend them to everyone they
know and parents pass them on to their children, so I hope that they
will continue to entertain many generations of children in the
future.
