JOLLY DECENT
A Modern Tom Brown's Schooldays. By Michael Scott. - (Harrap. 7s. 6d.)
MR. MICHAEL SCOTT is said to have travelled through Lapland on foot and to have been an assistant conductor at an opera house. `He should stick to his boots, his baton, and his old school tie, for as a would-be novelist he is inconsiderable. As a preacher (he admits it in a preface) he has been at pains to advocate as something admirable the combined heartiness, mawkishness, priggishness, complacency, ignorance, childish- ness, insensitiveness, and complete lack of individuality of a certain type of English public school boy. His Tom Brown, who is alleged to be a great-grandson of the original Tom-Brown, is also unmistakably a descendant of the hero of Eric : or, Little by Little. He is "a plucky boy" (in Hughes's time the phrase was "a well-plucked one "), but he is also a remark- ably soppy one. It is said that when Peter Pan was produced in France the French could see no point in un petit garcon quz ne voulait pas grandir. This Tom Brown shows few signs of wanting to grow up and fewer still of any capacity to do so.
One feels that he might reach without much trouble "the highest rung" of some profession or, as congenital cannon- for4der, be blown to pieces on some battlefield, but that so long
as he lived he would never grow out of his archness and smug- ness and the colossal triviality of his view of life: "Queer things Nature did to you.' Funny little feeling's inside, that you could not explain and that made you feel 'bubbly '."
Mr. Scott describes the odds and ends and the silly ritual of school life at tedious length, with ait abundance of schoolboy slang, and his Tom finds Rugby " farefcrr jollier than he had
ever imagined it." Having believed that "it wasn't done for boys to like poetry," he learns to like Rupert Brooke (the Period is 1921, with Rugby under Vaughan ; in David's time We used to get our teeth-into stronger meat than that), and all that stuff about the " benison " of hot Water and "the rough male-kiss of blankets." Osculation with one's bedclothes is respectable : otherwise "squash the thing," for there are" degrees of love." Tom confides his views on sex to a .soulful-eyed dog that he keeps at home :
"But I'm human, Chipsy. . . no, Chips, nothing to be
ashamed of : master knows his stuff, though he has been a big naughty at times to find out what it's all about." t
If it had been half a Mg it would have flown at his throat and settled his hash. -However, the dog it was that died, and an old man (one. of those "country people "who "can't afford to go to expensive schools ") delivered a funeral oration in these terms : ,
"Oh-as, he's alive, Marster Jan, he's alive in the happy hunting- ground and a-waking' for 'ee."
This wistful note is alsO struck by the use of' expressions like I s'pose " and " 'spec' so." What else need be said, ? Except
to record that the jolly Browns, who live in the Mendips, spend their time taking fences that are too high for envious neigh- boors with shorter pedigrees, and to regret that the "feeling of insignificance " which the playing fields of Rugby gave Tom on his arrival was not maintained. By the time he was ready to leave he felt that God was in his heaven, and all was right with our jolly old public schools. WILLIAM PLOMIA.
Previous page
