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.
