by A S Neill
"But", said Gordon, "all that would describe cows or sheep."
"Quite", I said; "in other words, I made a human race that was as high as the animal race."
"Here!" said Robert, with marked suspicion in his voice, "Did you mean the story to teach us something?"
"You mean, was it a tale with a moral? Yes, it was a story with a moral."
"What moral?"
"That the man who pays the piper calls the tune."
"Meaning what?"
"That the bloke as has all the trouble of making up the story deserves to be the only man left alive. In reality, I can't bump off all the young pests who follow me around all day asking the time, or have I seen Corks, or will I lend him tuppence, but in my story I can plan and execute revenge. The phantasy of any idiot who runs a free school must be that he is the last person alive."
"Time we were moving, lads", said Michael. "When Neill begins to talk psychology the only defence is flight. Come on."
"Where shall we go?" said Bunny.
"To the hockey-field", said David. "We must have a competition to see who can beat the others on the quick draw."
And for the next week someone said: Stick 'em up ! every time I turned a corner, and at the next General Meeting Robert sat with two wooden gats in his belt, and when he rose to speak on the question of Gerd's making a row in the cinema he said: "Say, sister, was the other broads in on this once-over? Youse frails try to beat the rap on the movie chisel in, and when the movie big bum lissens in on the short wave and beats it to a show-down, the janes do the wet hankie racket. Whatta yuh mean by it?"
FINIS
NOTES
Source
The contents of this ebook are sourced from the website http://thelastmanalive.tripod.com/home.html Many thanks are due to the anonymous author for providing the text and illustrations of this neglected and difficult to find classic - having read the novel several times in childhood, the compiler of this ebook had been searching fruitlessly for a affordable copy for some time, before stumbling across that invaluable site. The text has been lightly revised to amend a handful of very minor typos that probably originated in the scanning process. It is hoped that this revision has not resulted in the production of further, more severe, typos.
References
Airship: Neill was probably inspired to use an airship as preferred means of travel for the Last Man Alive story by a remarkable and dramatic incident that had occurred only a few miles away from Summerhill school during a late phase of WW1. The imperial German air force had attempted to bomb Southern England and especially London by means of airships. On 16-June 1917, a squadron of six Zeppelins were dispatched from Nordholz Airship Base on what turned out to be a disastrous mission. Four of the airship experienced technical difficulties and were forced to return to base. One airship, L42, bombed Ramsgate in mistake for Dover, where it killed 3 and injured 14 more; the other, L48, was forced to descent from its cruise altitude of 16,000 feet due to technical problems, and because its crew were frostbitten - apparently the airship designers had underestimated the problems of high altitude air travel. On 17 June 1917 at 3.25 am the 200m giant was shot down by three RFC fighters; the hydrogen filling exploded in mid-air, and the wreck crashed in a field near the village of Therberton. Only two of the seventeen crew members survived.
The crash attracted a great deal of attention and people came from long distances to see the remains of the crashed airship, some parts of which are still on display at the local museum in Leiston.
Chad:Paxton Chadwick taught art and and acted as school secretary.
Corks: George Corkhill was "a tall, quiet and courageous man, who had been a conscientious objector in the [First World] war, and had spent some time in Dartmoor prison for his beliefs. [...] He had a degree in science, but had also taken an MA in psychology [...]. Unobtrusive, naïve - he once found lodgings for a group of Summerhill boys in the middle of the red light district in Munich - he was immensely liked by the children. [...] Corks, as he came to be known, let the children make lemonade with citric acid, soap with fat and soda, water gardens, fireworks, glass and stink bombs - and once even Irish stew. He was to remain at Summerhill for the rest of his working life, providing Neill with a valuable right-hand man who could in his absence deal with any situation that arose. He was the kind of man, one pupil later observed, you could wake at two in the morning without any inhibition. Good stolid old George, never ruffled was how Neill saw him."
From: Jonathan Croall: Neill of Summerhill, Routledge, London, 1983
A Dominie's Five: A Dominie's Five, or Free School! (Herbert Jenkins, London, 1924) was in many ways the prototype for The Last Man Alive. In this book, Neill recounts a story he told to five of his students at his International School in Hellerau (near Dresden/Germany) and records their reactions to the plot development. As in The Last Man Alive, the story takes Neill and his protagonists around the world (in an automobile powered by Radium and solar energy) and features frequent scenes of gratuitous violence.
Dominie: a Scottish term for a schoolmaster, usually of the Church of Scotland. It comes from the Latin domine (vocative case of Dominus, “Lord, Master”).
Pyecraft: “Pyecraft the Millionaire” was one of Neill's favourite characters (probably the manifestation of his wish that some wealthy philanthropist would pop up and alleviate the notoriously dire financial situation of his school projects Hellerau and Summerhill), and was first mentioned in one of his earlier books, A Dominie's Five [...]. In this book his full name is mentioned: "Silas K.Pyecraft", a millionaire from New York (by the time The Last Man Alive was published in 1938, he had apparently moved his residence to the gangster capital Chicago).
Garrett's Works: In 1938, the Garrett factory was probably the major local employer. Throughout its history, it produced machines as diverse as steam engines, washing machines and ultra light airplanes. Today, the site houses the local museum.
About the Author
Alexander Sutherland Neill (17 October 1883 – 23 September 1973) was a Scottish educator and author known for his school, Summerhill, and its philosophies of freedom from adult coercion and community self-governance. Raised in Scotland, he was a poor student, but became a schoolteacher at several schools across the country before attending the University of Edinburgh in 1908–1912. He took two jobs in journalism before World War I and taught at Gretna Green Village School during the first year of the war, writing his first book, A Dominie’s Log (1915), as a diary of his life as head teacher. He joined the staff of a school in Dresden in 1921, founding Summerhill on his return to England in 1924. Summerhill received widespread renown in the 1920s to 1930s and then in the 1960s to 1970s, due to progressive and counter-culture interest. Neill wrote 20 books in his lifetime, his bestseller being the 1960 Summerhill, a compilation of four previous books on his school, read widely among the free school movement in the 1960s onwards.