Willans, Geoffrey: Down With Skool!

Down With Skool!, written by Geoffrey Willans and illustrated by Ronald Searle, is one of the diaries of Nigel Molesworth, a student at an archetypal 1950s British boarding school. I’d been vaguely aware of the phrase “as any fule kno,” but other than that I knew nothing about these until Down with Skool! appeared in the mail as a gift from my sister-in-law.

This is very, very silly. Molesworth takes his readers on a tour of life in a boarding school: headmasters, masters (teachers), classes, parents, and school food (including a longish fantasy on the revolt of the prunes—”‘Exactly,’ sa the sensitive prune. ‘Why should we revolt them all the time? Why canot they revolt us?'”). To my surprise, Molesworth’s extremely, err, personal spelling and punctuation only tripped me up a few times; I spent most of the time reading giggling quietly to myself.

For some reason, I am particularly fond of the section on math lessons, which includes this bit that nearly had me waking Chad up:

To do geom you hav to make a lot of things equal to each other when you can see perfectly well that they don’t. This agane is due to Pythagoras and it formed much of his conversation at brekfast.

Pythagoras (helping himself to porridge): Hmm. I see the sum of the squares on AB and BC = the square on AC.

Wife: Dear dear.

Pythagoras: I’m not surprised, not surprised at all. I’ve been saying that would come for years.

Wife: Yes dear.

Pythagoras: Now they’ll hav to do something about it. More tea please. There’s another thing — the day is coming when they’re going to have to face the fact that a strate line if infinitely protracted goes on for ever.

Wife: Quite so.

Pythagoras: Now take the angle a, for xsample.

(His wife suddenly looses control and thro the porridge at him. Enter Euclid: another weed and the 2 bores go off together)

(I think I got all the misspellings in.)

The book is also heavily illustrated, with, for instance, “Scenes in the life of Pythagoras”. Though the stalking of the lazy parallelograms amuses me, I like the portraits best; they are wonderfully expressive.

Though I know a teeny bit about boarding-school life from reading other novels, I can’t say I really felt I needed that knowledge; though the context changes, things like Molesworth’s reaction to memorizing poetry are universal:

In other words frankly i just don’t kno it.

Also quite frankly

I COULDN’T CARE LESS

What use will that be to me in the new atomic age?

Occasionally english masters childe me for this point of view o molesworth one [*] you must learn the value of spiritual things until i spray them with 200 rounds from my backterial gun. i then plant the british flag in the masters inkwell and declare a whole holiday for the skool. boo to shakespeare.

[*] His younger brother is Molesworth 2.

I think this is particularly good if you’re in school (I certainly would have been tempted to call various people “utterly wet” and “a weed” if I’d had the phrases), but I enjoyed the heck out of it and, thank goodness, I am no longer a student.