Fanzines and Webpages: MJ Hibbett Recommends Down With Skool by Geoffrey Willans & Ronald Searle

< previous

next>

This book changed my life when I first read it as a tiny in approx 1978. I picked it from the school book club ' I think it was the Puffin Readers' Club or similar, a newsletter which we all received on a regular basis with a list of books we could order for 50p. I can smell the newsletter and the new books as I type this! I got loads of books through that club, but this is the one that I've kept and, as you can see from the picture, have read a LOT.

It's the story of Nigel Molesworth, the self-styled 'gorilla of 3B', a pupil at St Custard's, a private boy's school in the 1950s. Nowadays people seem to be obsessed with children reading books that relate to their own experience, which I generally think is DAFT, but coo er gosh this book SPOKE to me. Like Molesworth I was at a boy's school (although mine was very much NOT a public school, minor or otherwise!) and knew assorted weeds, tics and toughs like Fotherington-Thomas ('Hullo clouds hullo sky he sa'), Grabber (the suspiciously David Cameron-esque head of school who wins everything because his parents are rich') and 'my grate friend Peason'. Like Molesworth we thought we had the measure of the STAFF and imagined their exploits in the smoke-filled staff rooms. Like Molesworth I didn't like school dinners very much, and also fancied myself something of an INTELLECTUAL, putting on the mask of joining in with boyish games of running down corridors but secretly a deep thinker, giving to musing on schoolyard events in terms of moments of history hem hem.

The main thing about this book though is it is BLOODY HILARIOUS, both in the way it is written, from Molesworth's point of view with a wisdom that, as he would say, 'belies his tender years', and in the accompanying pictures by Ronald Searle. He's more famous for St Trinian's these days, but the drawings of St Custard's and its denizens are action packed and full of attitude, even when he is drawing an army of PRUNES planning their takeover of the school canteen.

The stories were originally printed in The Young Elizabethan, and 1950s periodical for children that sounds terribly IMPROVING (goodness knows what Molesworth was doing in there) and later collected, with the 1970s version being one that seems to have introduced a whole other generation to St Custards. When Whizz for Atomms and Back In The Jug Agane appeared in the school newsletter I SNAPPED them up (NB when I talk of the GRATE influence these books have had on me you need only look to my use of CAPITALS for evidence) thinking that was THE LOT. Imagine then my delight nearly ten years later when I found a copy of How To Be Topp in a second hand bookshop in Leicester ' I'd read the originals so many times I knew them off by heart, but here was a whole heap of new (to me) stories. They were GRATE!

You can now buy all of the books collected together in The Compleet Molesworth which I would recommend to you wholeheartedly. They are very very very funny, even though the world of prunes, cowboy shows on TV, and school dogs has long gone, the humanity, hilarity and daring dreams of Nigel Molesworth and his friends is as fresh and necessary as it ever was.

Originally published on Joyzine in August 2017

< previous

next>