When boys were boys

Max Hastings finds comfort in

G.A. Henty, the Victorian writer of schoolboy thrillers and object of fastidious sneering

any people are suffering a surfeit of reality this week. They turn away in disgust from the television after hours of bombardment from frow Mop_ presenters of both sexes, keeping score of the Iraq war with the breathless solemnity normally reserved for a Premier League football match.

Let me propose an antidote. Settle down for some blissful opiate hours with the works of Mr GA. Henty, Victorian master of schoolboy thrillers. Over the past few weeks, after an interval of 40 years, I have been wallowing in The Dash for Khartoum, With Roberts to Pretoria, With Kitchener in the Soudan, By Pike and Dyke. There is little danger of exhausting supplies, since Henty wrote more than 50 such tales with prodigious fluency between 1871 and 1901, sometimes at the rate of four a year.

For those unlucky Spectator readers who never encountered the Master in their schooldays, Twill sketch the plot of a contem porary Henty yarn, With Bush to Baghdad. Sixteen-year-old Jack Jones, expelled from Eton for beating to pulp a sixth-form Gulf princeling proselytising for al-Qa'eda, declines a dreary spell at a crammer and opts for a life of adventure.

Seeing the way the world is going when George W. Bush starts strutting his stuff, Jack embarks on a crash course in Arabic, and makes himself word-perfect before securing a post with Oxfam in Jordan. Once established in the theatre of operations, he takes a bath in heavy-duty walnut stain, buys himself a depressingly tasteless artifi cial-fibre suit in the bazaar, and slips away into Iraq masquerading as an Algerian purveyor of pornographic videotapes.

In Baghdad he befriends a poor but honest family bitterly hostile to the regime, enlists their youngest son as his projection ist, and insinuates himself and his wares into the ruling circle. Having escaped from the clutches of the secret police with the aid of his devoted Iraqi sidekick, under cover of darkness he paints in whitewash on the roof of the tyrant's bunker SADDAM IS HERE, enabling a Stealth bomber to vaporise the building and its occupant.

Before escaping to a hero's welcome in the allied lines, he is able to discover the access code of a dead Iraqi general's Swiss bank account. On returning to England, after an audience with the monarch he trousers the Zurich hoard, buys the Gloucestershire estate of a disgraced Granada executive, and settles down to a life of honoured content ment, knowing that he has done his bit for Queen and country before reaching an age at which shaving is necessary.

G.A. Henty has been considerably mocked by posterity. Even among his contemporaries some thought that he overegged the pudding a bit. There is a tinge of contempt in the DNB account of his life. I provoked the deri sion of a former foreign secretary the other night by describing my recent canter through Henty's works. He thought that I would have been more profitably employed reading Jeffrey Archer.

Even we aficionados should acknowledge that the picture of life the author offered to several generations of English schoolboys was a trifle optimistic. First, he taught them to suppose that they could expect justice to pre vail. If a boy is accused of stealing a postal order in chapter one, in chapter 24 the stain will assuredly be lifted from his character.

Henty's schoolboys who enlist in the ranks of the armies of Marlborough, Wellington, Cortez, etc., are treated with unfailing cour tesy by their seniors and invited to describe their exploits to an admiring throng in the officers mess, instead of being kicked snivelling back to the stables to clean the tack, a more plausible scenario.

Foreigners, even dervishes and suchlike lost souls, can be persuaded to recognise the merits of Christianity and Empire after a few hours of persuasion by an honest British lad with a Martini-Henry or even a spear over his shoulder. Beric the Briton converted several ancient Romans (as well as himself) to the paths of righteousness, before disposing of the lions deputed to make luncheon meat out of him.

A general indulgence was extended to looting. A Henty teenager who accounted for a respectable game bag of Boers, Maharattas, Frenchmen, Prussians or suchlike was permitted by the author to plunder a temple, treasury or palace to rich effect before he went home, as well as being mentioned in dispatches. In Henty's works, there is none of that nonsense about virtue being its own reward.

Yet his youthful heroes (identical, of course, in every novel) can be held up as models of modern enlightened thought in some respects. They swotted like mad at foreign languages. Unless one did so, said Henty, there was no prospect of being able to pass oneself off as a Boer farmer, Sikh warrior, Spanish hidalgo or German loot broker to earn the plaudits of Napier, Nelson, Gambetta, etc.

It was essential to show oneself manly, which meant being a keen swimmer, dead shot, Olympic sprinter, strong horseman, and staying away from girls unless they needed saving from cannibals or marrying after the victory celebrations. It was also necessary to show lots of initiative and to be willing to travel. There was no place for wimpish stay-at-homes. If no jobs were to be found within the M25 ring, Henty urged working one's passage to waters where a boy who could cut out a Spanish frigate before tiffin was properly valued.

Henty saw no principled objection to enlisting in foreign service, provided this did not serve a cause inimical to British interests. He conveyed the message that work could be fun, so long as one was sensible enough to avoid musty counting houses and to pursue a vocation with an army, naval squadron or respectable mercenary unit.

In all his books, he prided himself on the accuracy of the large dollops of history he purveyed to his audience. Indeed, any modern schoolboy who read the collected works of Henty would know a good deal more about Britain's past triumphs than the average 21st-century Wykehamist or Etonian.

Even when I was lapping up the author's tales 45 years ago, however, the books had become a mild embarrassment in school libraries. Today, I fancy that they are gone altogether. My own collection of Henty's works has been acquired at auctions and from Heywood Hill. Several volumes, the bookplates reveal, were school prizes a century ago. One declares itself to be the property of Summerfields prep school. I would bet that some new-fangled schoolmaster at Summerfields disposed of their Hentys as a job-lot a decade or two ago. Shame on him.

The books are relics of an era of unshaken national self-confidence. Henry could create his tales with the assurance that his readers shared a common attachment to Empire, pluck and the merits of cold baths and canings. Several volumes attribute the defects of some minor character to the fact that he never enjoyed the privilege of being regularly whacked at an English public school.

In the unlikely event that I could persuade my own children to read the books today, they would be dismissed as both ridiculous and drearily moralistic. Among a modern readership Flashman, prince of cads, reigns supreme in the one place where Henty's young gentlemen never ventured: beyond the bedroom door.