by Barry Day
The Wodehouse brothers were entrusted to a governess, Miss Roper, until P.G. was five, then for the next three years to a ‘dame school’ run on strict Christian lines by the Misses Florrie and Cissie Prince:
While my parents were in Hong Kong, my brothers and I lived with some people called Prince in South Croydon, and I remember what a rustic place it was then. I once got into trouble for stealing turnips out of a near-by turnip field. It was looked on as a major crime. Probably that is what has given me the respect for the law which I have always had … I suppose it was a good bringing up, but it certainly did not tend to make one adventurous. I can’t remember having done any other naughty thing the whole of the three years I was there.
‘The great event of the year’ for him was the visit to Grandmother Wodehouse’s:
We were left very much to ourselves … Once a day we were taken in to see our grandmother – a wizened old lady who looked just like a monkey and gave us a kindly audience for about ten minutes. Incidentally, I have always felt how lucky I was not to have been born earlier, as I missed the period during which parents beat their sons unmercifully. My father told me that when he was a boy this kindly grandmother used to whale the tar out of him.
He was then sent to Elizabeth College, a small public school in Guernsey, for two years (‘the best place for a weak chest was supposed to be the Channel Islands …’). He found Guernsey in those days ‘a delightful place full of lovely bays and as far as I can remember, our movements were never restricted and we were allowed to roam where we liked. My recollections are all of wandering about the island and of the awful steamer trips back to England. Paddle wheel steamers, like on the Mississippi – very small and rolling with every wave.’
Later he went to a preparatory school at Kearsney in Kent which prepared boys for the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth. Presumably it shared the qualities of all preparatory schools:
[It] was faintly scented with a composite aroma consisting of roast beef, ink, chalk, and that curious classroom smell which is like nothing else on earth.
(The Little Nugget)
It was an unsettled existence, to say the least:
My parents were in Hong Kong most of the time when I was in the knickerbocker stage, and during my school holidays I was passed from aunt to aunt … Looking back I can see that I was just passed from hand to hand … I never knew any of them at all … It was an odd life with no home to go to, but I have always accepted everything that happens to me in a philosophical spirit; and I can’t remember ever having been unhappy in those days. My feeling now is that it was very decent of those aunts to put up three small boys for all those years. The only thing you could say for us is that we never gave any trouble … I had a very happy childhood.
Wodehouse then managed to persuade his father to send him to Dulwich College, where a scholarship of £20 a year certainly helped with the fees. His brother Armine was already there and Wodehouse himself had fallen in love with the place at first sight. Realising that his son’s poor eyesight would inevitably put the navy out of reach, Ernest Wodehouse agreed and in 1894 the boy became a boarder.
* * * *
In 1896 Wodehouse’s parents returned to England on Ernest’s retirement – a retirement caused in a manner worthy of his son’s subsequent invention. On a bet he walked around the perimeter of Hong Kong Island in the blazing sun and ended up with severe sunstroke. Whether or not he won the bet is not clear but he did manage to live cheerfully, if precariously, on a pension for the next thirty years. Unfortunately for all concerned, it was paid to him in rupees. (‘The rupee is the last thing in the world … with which anyone who valued his peace of mind would wish to be associated. It never stayed put for a second. “Watch that rupee!” was the cry in the Wodehouse family.’)
To begin with the Wodehouses took a house in Dulwich but soon moved to Shropshire. It was there that Wodehouse developed one of the most meaningful emotional relationships he was ever to know – he acquired a dog, a mongrel named Bob.
In his more settled later life he was rarely to be seen without a dog and usually several. The dog of choice was almost always a Pekinese:
Pekes really are a different race and class. They may try to be democratic, but they don’t really accept other dogs as their social equals.
(Letter to William Townend – 15 October 1934)
It looked something like a pen-wiper and something like a piece of hearth-rug. A second and keener inspection revealed it as a Pekinese puppy.
(‘Goodbye to All Cats’ from Young Men in Spats)
The Peke sniffed at [the piece of cake] disparagingly, and resumed its steady gaze. It wanted chicken. It is the simple creed of the Peke that, where two human beings are gathered together to eat, chicken must enter the proceedings somewhere.
(Big Money)
‘Well,’ she said, choking on the word like a Pekinese on a chump chop too large for its frail strength.
(Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit)
He swallowed convulsively, like a Pekinese taking a pill.
(The Code of the Woosters)
The Pekinese dog was hurling abuse in Chinese.
(‘Birth of a Salesman’ from Nothing Serious)
The Peke followed him. It appeared to have no legs, but to move by faith alone.
(‘Lord Emsworth Acts for the Best’ from Blandings Castle)
In Wodehouse the average dog is likely to receive a more sympathetic review than its average two-legged friend:
‘’As that dog ’ad ’er breakfast?’
‘She was eating a shoe when I saw her last.’
‘Ah, well, maybe that’ll do her till dinnertime.’
(Sam the Sudden)
*
‘It’s about those dogs of yours. What do they live on?’
‘The chairs most of the time.’
(Full Moon)
*
Sammy [the bulldog] is the most amiable soul in the world and can be happy with anyone. This is the dog I was given by one of the girls (in Miss 1917) and he cost a fortune when we first had him, because he was always liking the looks of passers-by outside our garden gate and trotting out and following them. The first time he disappeared, we gave the man who brought him back ten dollars, and this got around among the local children, and stirred up their business instincts. They would come to our gate and call, ‘Sammy, Sammy, Sammy’, and out old Sam would waddle, and then they would bring him back with a cheery ‘We found your dog wandering down the road, mister’ and cash in. I may add that the bottom dropped out of the market and today any child that collects twenty-five cents thinks he has done well.
(Letter to William Townend, 28 February 1920)
There were a few notable exceptions in the canon, however – Bartholomew, the Aberdeen Terrier, being one:
[It] gave me an unpleasant look and said something under its breath in Gaelic.
(The Code of the Woosters)
Aberdeen terriers, possibly owing to their heavy eyebrows, always seem to look at you as if they were in the pulpit of some particularly strict Scottish sect and you were a parishioner of dubious reputation sitting in the front row of the stalls.
(Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves)
[Bartholomew] hopped from the bed and, advancing into the middle of the room, took a seat, breathing through the nose with a curious whistling sound, and looking at us from under his eyebrows like a Scottish elder rebuking sin from the pulpit.
(The Code of the Woosters)
The dog Bartholomew gave me an un pleasantly superior look, as if asking if I were saved.
(Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves)
It would seem that a dog has to be small to be fond of a joke. You never find an Irish wolf hound trying to be a standup comic.
(Introduction to Elliott Erwitt’s Son of Bitch)
Apart from the gift of tongues, any dog lover is likely to take an anthropomorphic view, even of the most ‘hairy and nondescript’ of the species:
… its gaze was cold, wary and
suspicious, like that of a stockbroker who thinks someone is going to play the confidence trick on him.
(‘Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend’ from Blandings Castle)
When he retired – as it turned out – to Remsenburg, Long Island, after the war, Wodehouse also managed to acquire assorted cats. In fact, he tended to collect a miscellany of pets by a combination of accident and design, rather like the way a magnet collects iron filings. But somehow there was never quite the same affection, at least in his description of them.
The cat had that air of portly well-being which we associate with those who dwell in cathedral closes … for all its sleek exterior [he] was mean and bitter. He had no music in his soul, and was fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils. One could picture him stealing milk from a sick tabby.
(‘Cats Will Be Cats’ from Mulliner Nights)
*
‘What I’ve got against cats,’ said a Lemon Sour … ‘is their unreliability. They lack candour and are not square shooters. You get your cat and you call him Thomas or George, as the case may be. So far, so good. Then one morning you wake up and find six kittens in the hat-box and you have to reopen the whole matter, approaching it from an entirely different angle.’
(‘The Story of Webster’ from Mulliner Nights)
Webster, of course, was the King of Wodehouse Cats:
Webster was not a natty spectacle. Some tough cats from the public-house on the corner had recently been trying to muscle in on his personal dustbin, and, though he had fought them off, the affair had left its mark upon him. A further section had been removed from his already abbreviated ear, and his once sleek flanks were short of several patches of hair. He looked like the late Legs Diamond after a social evening with a few old friends.
(‘Cats Will Be Cats’ from Mulliner Nights)
*
Cats, as a class, have never completely got over the snootiness caused by the fact that in Ancient Egypt they were worshipped as gods.
(‘The Story of Webster’ from Mulliner Nights)
Even so, as far as Wodehouse was concerned, if it barked, meowed or chirruped, he was its abject slave. Late in life he and his wife Ethel subsidised the Bide-A-Wee animal shelter.
He was a rather sentimental man, who subscribed to homes for unwanted dogs and cats and rarely failed to cry when watching a motion picture with a sad ending.
(Do Butlers Burgle Banks?)
Bertie might complain about his Aunt Agatha because she lavished on the dog McIntosh ‘a love which might have been better bestowed on a nephew’, but any dog lover – particularly one with a nephew – knows that it was Wodehouse and Aunt Agatha who had the canine/human ratio right.
Today it is raining again, and your words about ‘A wet dog is the lovingest’ are ringing in my ears. We have two wet dogs brimming over with lovingness. I can cope with the boxer, who stays put, but the dachshund’s heart breaks if I don’t have him on my lap. The only way of beating the game is to go about in a bathrobe.
(Letter to Ogden Nash – 13 January 1962)
* * * *
Although he was remorseless in his fiction on the subject of child prodigies, Wodehouse could be said to have been one himself. In a 1965 TV interview he told his friend, Malcolm Muggeridge:
They tell me I was writing when I was five, but it seems rather extraordinary, doesn’t it?
… and in a letter to Richard Usborne a decade earlier:
When I was six years old, I read the whole of Pope’s Iliad. I can’t have been more than six, because I read it at my grandmother’s in Worcestershire and she died when I was either six or seven and the house was sold. So it must have been when I was either six or seven, and I remember loving it.
But while he may have been a literary lion in embryo, he recalled that his social skills were not nearly as well developed:
Even at the age of ten I was a social bust, contributing little or nothing to the feast of reason or the flow of soul beyond shuffling my feet and kicking the leg of the chair into which loving hands had dumped me.
In short:
Boyhood, like measles, is one of those complaints which a man should catch young and have done with.
(Uneasy Money)
CHAPTER TWO
Upstairs …
Amitae, Materterae* …
And Other Relations
It’s no use telling me that there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof.
(The Code of the Woosters)
In this life it is not aunts that matter but the courage which one brings to them.
(The Mating Season)
We would spend our holidays with various aunts, some of whom I liked but one or two of whom were very formidable Victorian women.
* * * *
In the Wodehouse vocabulary – indeed, in the vocabulary of his immediate generation – the appellation ‘Aunt’ did not necessarily signify a blood relative. It could and did equally well apply to any older woman with whom the family came into close contact.
Not that he was by any means deficient in the genuine article. Wodehouse historian Norman Murphy has traced no less than twenty of them (‘As far as the eye could reach, I found myself gazing on a surging sea of aunts. There were tall aunts, short aunts, stout aunts, thin aunts, and an aunt who was carrying on a conversation in a low voice to which nobody seemed to be paying the slightest attention.’ (The Mating Season). ‘Dozens of aunts … far-flung aunts scattered all over England, and each the leading blister of her particular county.’)
One way or another – whether it was by one or other of the aunts he was to claim he could never remember or by the odd governess or teacher – the Young Wodehouse’s early upbringing was very much skewed to the distaff side. And since he was only in his mother’s company for some six months between the ages of two and fifteen, all of these ‘Aunts’ were, for good or ill, mother substitutes. (‘Nanny or elder sister … you can’t ever really lose your awe of someone who used to scrub your face with a soapy flannel.’)
Victorian middle-class society being what it was, it was they who would have taken him to church and made him accompany them on formal social visits, thereby giving him early insights into two areas that were to provide him with ample material as a writer in years to come – the upstairs/downstairs world of master and servant and the Great Upstairs as seen from below.
They would also have been likely – almost as a reflex action – to have insisted on strict standards of behaviour. (A Victorian child ‘should be seen and not heard’.) Nor would there necessarily have been any great degree of affection involved in the application of the rules. Which is not to suggest that Wodehouse was badly treated by these surrogate mothers – simply that he was denied the maternal love a child needs in its formative years and, as a result, withdrew into a world of his own making, where such things were not allowed to matter. Without embarking on a psychological treatise, it perhaps helps explain his lack of involvement in close personal relationships in later life.
In any case Wodehouse was to have his amiable revenge on the battalions of female authority figures – that ‘covey of mildewed females whom he had classified under the general heading of Aunts’ (‘Goodbye to All Cats’ from Young Men in Spats).
I suppose the reason why one uses aunts so much as dragons is that one can’t very well have an unpleasant mother in a story. I was always very fond of my aunts.
The Wodehouse Aunt per se has certain defining characteristics:
… A bleak, austere expression. She was looking more like an aunt than anything human. In his boyhood he had observed platoons of aunts with their features frozen in a similar rigidity …
(Barmy in Wonderland)
*
Aunts as a class are like Napoleon: they expect their orders to be carried out without a hitch and don’t listen to excuses.
(Much Obliged, Jeeves)
*
Like so many aunts, she was gifted with a sort
of second sight.
(Uncle Fred in the Springtime)
*
‘Barker!’ [Freddie’s] voice had a ring of pain.
‘Sir?’
‘What’s this?’
‘Poached egg, sir.’
Freddie averted his eyes with a silent shudder.
‘It looks just like an old aunt of mine,’ he said.
(Jill the Reckless)
*
‘Do you know what is the trouble with aunts as a class?’
‘No, sir.’
‘They are not gentlemen.’
(Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen)
*
When one character casually mentions that he might ‘stroll in on’ an Aunt, he is firmly dissuaded:
‘I wouldn’t.’
‘She can’t eat me.’
‘I don’t know so much. She’s not a vegetarian.’
(The Old Reliable)
By definition, in the Wodehouse canon all young men are doomed to suffer from Aunt-itis but none more so than Bertie Wooster, for whom they assume the proportions of an epidemic:
In these disturbed days in which we live, it has probably occurred to all thinking men that something drastic ought to be done about aunts. Speaking for myself, I have long felt that stones should be turned and avenues explored with a view to putting a stopper on the relatives in question. If someone were to come to me and say, ‘Wooster, would you be interested in joining a society I am starting whose aim will be the suppression of aunts or at least will see to it that they are kept on a short chain and are not permitted to roam hither and thither at will, scattering desolation on all sides?’, I would reply, ‘Wilbraham’, if his name was Wilbraham, ‘I am with you heart and soul. Put me down as a foundation member.’