The novels and short stories of P.G. Wodehouse were famously shaped by the author’s own life and youth
BY PATRICK WEST
The novels and short stories of P. G. Wodehouse were famously shaped by the author’s own life and youth. The author, best known for his Jeeves and Wooster tales, was born in Guildford in 1881, but his parents barely featured in his life: between the age of three and fifteen and he saw them for no more than six months. While his father and mother were ensconced in Hong Kong – his father Ernest being a magistrate in the colony, Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (“Plum” for short) – was raised variously in Bath, Croydon, Guernsey and Kearsney in Kent by a nanny and series of aunts, several of whom were married to clergymen. It’s no coincidence that vicars and aunts feature prominently in the life of his most cherished creation, Bertie Wooster, whose parents are non-existent in the Jeeves and Wooster tales.
Wodehouse’s lonesome and detached childhood came to end in 1894 when he persuaded his father to have him transferred from a naval preparatory school in Kearnsey, just outside Dover, to Dulwich College. His father Ernest had spotted the imposing red-brick school from a suburban train during a rare visit to London, and decided to send an older son, Armine, there. According to Robert McCrum 2004’s biography, Wodehouse, A Life, Plum, visiting his brother during one vacation “fell for its tranquil grounds and ordered serenity. After his rootless, solitary childhood, the attractions of somewhere settled and well run, with plenty of other boys for companionship, were obvious.”
Dulwich’s pupils, remembered Wodehouse, were of “respectable solvent” parents, who had sent their sons to be educated in the knowledge that “we all had to be earn a living later on.” He excelled at the open examination, winning a scholarship, and was placeed in a form of boys older than himself. Wodehouse remembered his years at Dulwich College as “a breeze”, and “six years of unbroken bliss.”
The happier, settled times at Dulwich College clearly influenced his work. The college’s 65 acres of playing fields, the stately avenues, chestnut-lined avenues and Italianate buildings were reinvented as “Valley Fields”, the “fragrant oasis” in his Blandlings Castle stories. As well as representing the school in the First XV for rugby football, Wodehouse was a first-class cricketer, as was a subsequent fictional creation, Mike Jackson from the Psmith stories. Plum also excelled at classics, and not a Jeeves and Wooster tale passes without Jeeves elucidating on a matter in Latin, as in Joy in the Morning here:
“Jeeves: Precisely, sir. Rem acu tetigisti.
Bertie: Rem—?
Jeeves: Acu tetigisti, sir. A Latin expression, literally meaning “you have touched the matter with a needle”. A more idiomatic rendering would be—
Bertie: Put my finger on the nub?
Jeeves: Exactly, sir.”
Wodehouse, had started a day boy, swiftly became a boarder, in the autumn of 1894. He thus rarely came into contact with girls, apart from housemaids or daughters of a housemaster. Likewise, females scarcely feature in his fiction. Where they do appear, in the Jeeves stories, they prove to be intrusive and disruptive. They are either overbearing and borderline psychopath aunts, or dysfunctional would-be brides – such as the prankster Bobbie Wickham, the insufferably soppy Madeline Bassett or the over-serious Florence Craye (who wants to teach Nietzsche to Bertie).
Bertie was far more interested in food than woman, being far more concerned by any threats made by Aunt Dahlia to give her wizard French chef Anatole the heave-ho unless her nephew carry out some task for her.
Wodehouse was a likewise known as a gastronome at Dulwich, where he recalled “open fires in winter, a kettle for tea or cocoa, a toasting fork, a twice-daily delivery of bread, milk and what the boys called ‘spreads’ such as dripping, meat extracts, or honey. There was a Buttery in the Centre Block for milk and jam or chocolate ‘splits during morning break, and ‘warm’ cake for afternoon tea; and there was a meat meal and often spong or suet puddings.”
Plum came into his element in the sixth form, being editor of the school magazine, The Alleynian, from 1899 to 1900. He had planned to go to Oxford, but his father could not afford to send a third son to university. Plum’s heartbreak at this is retold starkly in Psmith in the City (1909), where Mike is told that he cannot go to Cambridge for the same reason. “I know it’s a terrible disappointment for you, old chap”, says Mike’s father.
George Orwell wrote that Wodehouse “remained ‘fixated’ on his old school” with Dulwich College even after he left it in 1900 to become briefly, and unsuccessfully, a banker – a fate that was also replicated in Psmith in the City by the main protagonist. Indeed, school novels feature in his early novels. The Pothunters (1902), and the more ambitious Mike (1909), and seven of his earliest books were set in a barely modified Dulwich College by the name of Wrykyn. Orwell wrote: “In these early stories the ‘glamour’ of public-school life (house matches, fagging, teas round the study fire, etc.), is laid on fairly thick, and the ‘play the game’ code of morals is accepted with not many reservations.”
It was no surprise that his earliest fans were schoolboys, so true to life were they. As noted by Wodehouse’s Times obituary : “His stories, coming out in monthly parts, were more realistic and true to Public School life than most of their predecessors.”
P.G. Wodehouse found a wider audience following the creation of Bertie Wooster in 1919. Yet up until the Second World War he continued to attend cricket and rugby matches at the College, and wrote accounts of many for The Alleynian.
He was in France when it was invaded in 1940, and following his detention by the Germans, he unwisely agreed to make some “humorous” radio broadcasts from Berlin about life as captor. These were received badly in Britain, and fearing the consequences of his return, he spent the rest of his days on Long Island, where he regularly followed newspaper reports of games at Dulwich from the airmail edition of The Times.
At the College Library today there is a permanent display in the College Library, which bears his name, of his desk and memorabilia. The College has a collection of his books, letters and manuscripts, the latter at his bequest.
Wodehouse admitted to having a fixation with Dulwich College. “I sometimes feel,” he wrote in a letter of 1933, “as if I were a case of infantalism. I haven’t develped mentally at all since my last year at school. All my ideas and ideals are the same.” This “infantalism” would explain why Jeeves and Wooster remained frozen in time in an Edwardian timewarp, even when they continued to appear in new novels by the author up until the 1970s. It would explain also why P.G.Wodehouse remained so attached to Dulwich College: he was forever attached to his school days of yore in south-east London.
Patrick West is a columnist for spiked-online.com. His latest book is Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times (Societas).
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