Education: Poison-Ivied Walls

As almost every Briton knows, the school called St. Trinian’s is a strange, spooky, neo-Gothic institution based somewhere in England. At St. Trinian’s, gargoylish women in high-collared dresses and spindle-shanked girls in mussy black tunics go blithely through term after term of arson, mayhem and murder. For sheer energy, the St. Trinian’s girl has no match.

She has an avid taste for “how-to” books, e.g., How to Shrink a Human Head, is extremely inventive in lab (“Smashing!—Now pass the bat’s blood”), once thought up a ripping plan for blowing up Herbert Morrison and the Houses of Parliament on Guy Fawkes Day.

Sometimes she is seen strolling calmly down a corridor with a hippopotamus on a leash. Sometimes she is roasting an ox in her room, or hanging a teacher (“Well, that’s O.K.—now for old ‘Stinks’ “), or merely stretching a chum out on a medieval rack. On nature walks, she likes to collect poisonous mushrooms (“Chuck those out—they’re harmless”), would hardly ever go boating without making at least one lowerclassman walk the plank. Faced with a faculty frown (“Hand up the girl who burnt down the East Wing last night”), she can look angelic; but occasionally she must pay for her crimes by writing lines (“I must not smoke cigars during prayers. I must not smoke cigars during . . .”).

In the last twelve years, these ghoulish girls have won fame & fortune for their creator. A wiry, goateed man who still suffers from the “cab-horse knees” acquired in a World War II Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, Cartoonist Ronald Searle has seen St. Trinian’s become a part of the British public school folklore. His first two cartoon books have both gone through nine printings, and the school itself has appeared in skits in at least three musical revues. Today its bloody playing fields are as famous as Eton’s, and its horrible little girls are quite as well known as Tom Brown or Billy Bunter.

But to Cartoonist Searle’s horror, St. Trinian’s has also become a synonym. He first realized this on the day he read a newspaper account of how three girls in Scotland actually did try to burn down a school. “When he read that,” says his wife, “he went absolutely white. I kept praying —please, please, don’t let them mention St. Trinian’s!” But, of course, the newspapers did.

Last week, fed up with his own “Frankenstein monster,” Ronald Searle confirmed the closing of his imaginary school. In his new book, Souls in Torment, his girls are still playing their old tricks—but they are doing so for the last time. They squash their last teacher under a roller, stab their last classmate in gym (“Some little girl didn’t hear me say ‘unarmed combat,’ ” chides a teacher), and, having come into possession of some top secret information, they blow up their school with the latest atom bomb. From now on, St. Trinian’s will be only a word—to be used every time a school window is broken, a classroom wrecked or an underclassman over-hazed. Otherwise, wrote Poet C. Day Lewis in a special dirge, St. Trinian’s is gone:

Where are the girls of yesteryear? How

strange To think they’re scattered East, South,

West and North—Those pale Medusas of the Upper

Fourth, Those Marihuanas of the Moated

Grange . , .

Now poison ivy twines the dorm where

casks Were broached and music mistresses

were flayed, While on the sports ground where the

pupils played, The relatively harmless adder basks . .