Hurrah for Men in Tights
When he created Jennings, Anthony Buckeridge captured the essence of English boarding school life.
"I think we should all dress up as women. The boys will enjoy that." This judgment in favour of a liberal, if inexpert, application of mascara and eyeliner was the invariable conclusion to an annual discussion. And, delivered with the full authority of a former rugger international, it brooked no contradiction. Teaching at a boys' boarding school in the 1980s was a daily education in that gift for the surreal which is never far beneath the surface of English institutional life. And never more so than at the end of the advent term, when boys and masters improvised dramatic sketches in order to entertain each other. It meant a few hours of licensed anarchy - as opposed to the unlicensed kind which always seemed about to engulf us.
Historians and anthropologists study such officially approved periods of "misrule", when usual boundaries are transgressed. And the theory behind the practice is always the same: the letting off of steam may liberate energies that could otherwise turn nasty. The boys' shows would tease and mock their elders, who would then conspire to show on stage their human side - quite often by letting the feminine angle into their lives. And so strapping chaps and golden lads alike camped it up in wigs and tights. Gosh, how we laughed.
Quite what should happen next once the twinset and pearls were firmly in place often seemed uncertain. Sometimes it seemed as if the dressing up was the sole point of the performance. But farce carries with it an inner momentum - and that genre's gift for deflation, for the improbable that turns into the credible, took over on stage because it was the ambit of daily term-time lives and not just that of one early December evening.
This truth of the perpetual boarding school farce was well understood by the author Anthony Buckeridge, who died earlier this week. His creation Jennings - the most engaging, well-intentioned and persistently baffled of all boys' boarding school heroes - first came to life as a radio play in 1948, and only then did Jennings and his best chum Derbyshire move into print. Their creator was always a man of the theatre, combining acting in rep while also teaching at a series of boys' schools on the south coast. It was that dual experience that gave him an aesthetic, but also a particularly realistic view of the institutional world in which he served.
Jennings is a character based on a schoolmaster's experience and observation of real boys. In this respect he is very different from other earlier fantasies of the literature of boyhood such as Wodehouse's Mike, Frank Richards's Bunter or Benson's David. Mike is a one-dimensional sportsman, Bunter is a grotesque, and the angle on David is one distorted by homoeroticism.
Buckeridge's Jennings is different because he captures the literal-mindedness of childhood, its willingness to take what adults say seriously and its vulnerability as a result of that fact. He is seen sympathetically by an author who knows that an adult and a child are two completely different kinds of beings. But there is no sentiment about this. Buckeridge is not offering an English equivalent of Rousseau or updating Wordsworth with a 1950s version of the privileged, innocent child. Jennings's problem is that he has no talent for metaphor, analogy or equivocation, for these are adults' techniques. When one master loses a cuff link, the helpful Jennings writes a reminder to himself of that fact so he can go and search for it. But the discovery by officialdom of "Mr Carter - the missing link", written in Jennings's scrawl, seems more of a Darwinian slur than a sign of a helping hand. Punishment therefore attends the best of this boy's earnest intentions.
He is perpetually 11 - before the storms of adolescent suspicion break the capacity to take the world on trust. His life is a series of scrapes, but they are not the result of awkward mischief - as in the case of Crompton's Just William. He is an inquisitive, bright and resourceful character who genuinely wants things to go well in the world. And, as a 1950s boy, he is especially interested in gadgetry and technology. Linbury Court is not some timeless Arcady where the leaves rustle on the close. It is very much postwar Britain, where class is becoming porous and the future will be more interesting than the past.
Buckeridge, a lifelong socialist, doubtless brought something of his own style into Linbury Court. Sociologically, the place is gentler than most boarding schools of that time. But the invented institution captures the innocence of a milieu where the unnatural has been written into the very terms of reference. Women and girls are absent. Boys' families have walk-on parts for speech days. The masters correspond to the 1920s Oxford division between "hearties" and "aesthetes". Gruff ones coach the rugger. Sensitive types retire to listen to Beethoven on the third programme after supper. Few of them seem to be "family men". It was all a long time ago and Mr Macmillan was prime minister. But I bet that at Linbury Court they too thought that men in tights were a real hoot.
Historians and anthropologists study such officially approved periods of "misrule", when usual boundaries are transgressed. And the theory behind the practice is always the same: the letting off of steam may liberate energies that could otherwise turn nasty. The boys' shows would tease and mock their elders, who would then conspire to show on stage their human side - quite often by letting the feminine angle into their lives. And so strapping chaps and golden lads alike camped it up in wigs and tights. Gosh, how we laughed.
Quite what should happen next once the twinset and pearls were firmly in place often seemed uncertain. Sometimes it seemed as if the dressing up was the sole point of the performance. But farce carries with it an inner momentum - and that genre's gift for deflation, for the improbable that turns into the credible, took over on stage because it was the ambit of daily term-time lives and not just that of one early December evening.
This truth of the perpetual boarding school farce was well understood by the author Anthony Buckeridge, who died earlier this week. His creation Jennings - the most engaging, well-intentioned and persistently baffled of all boys' boarding school heroes - first came to life as a radio play in 1948, and only then did Jennings and his best chum Derbyshire move into print. Their creator was always a man of the theatre, combining acting in rep while also teaching at a series of boys' schools on the south coast. It was that dual experience that gave him an aesthetic, but also a particularly realistic view of the institutional world in which he served.
Jennings is a character based on a schoolmaster's experience and observation of real boys. In this respect he is very different from other earlier fantasies of the literature of boyhood such as Wodehouse's Mike, Frank Richards's Bunter or Benson's David. Mike is a one-dimensional sportsman, Bunter is a grotesque, and the angle on David is one distorted by homoeroticism.
Buckeridge's Jennings is different because he captures the literal-mindedness of childhood, its willingness to take what adults say seriously and its vulnerability as a result of that fact. He is seen sympathetically by an author who knows that an adult and a child are two completely different kinds of beings. But there is no sentiment about this. Buckeridge is not offering an English equivalent of Rousseau or updating Wordsworth with a 1950s version of the privileged, innocent child. Jennings's problem is that he has no talent for metaphor, analogy or equivocation, for these are adults' techniques. When one master loses a cuff link, the helpful Jennings writes a reminder to himself of that fact so he can go and search for it. But the discovery by officialdom of "Mr Carter - the missing link", written in Jennings's scrawl, seems more of a Darwinian slur than a sign of a helping hand. Punishment therefore attends the best of this boy's earnest intentions.
He is perpetually 11 - before the storms of adolescent suspicion break the capacity to take the world on trust. His life is a series of scrapes, but they are not the result of awkward mischief - as in the case of Crompton's Just William. He is an inquisitive, bright and resourceful character who genuinely wants things to go well in the world. And, as a 1950s boy, he is especially interested in gadgetry and technology. Linbury Court is not some timeless Arcady where the leaves rustle on the close. It is very much postwar Britain, where class is becoming porous and the future will be more interesting than the past.
Buckeridge, a lifelong socialist, doubtless brought something of his own style into Linbury Court. Sociologically, the place is gentler than most boarding schools of that time. But the invented institution captures the innocence of a milieu where the unnatural has been written into the very terms of reference. Women and girls are absent. Boys' families have walk-on parts for speech days. The masters correspond to the 1920s Oxford division between "hearties" and "aesthetes". Gruff ones coach the rugger. Sensitive types retire to listen to Beethoven on the third programme after supper. Few of them seem to be "family men". It was all a long time ago and Mr Macmillan was prime minister. But I bet that at Linbury Court they too thought that men in tights were a real hoot.
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