Books: the curse of st custard’s

HOW TO BE TOPP (106 pp.)—Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle—Vanguard ($2.50).

“BACK TO SKOOL AGANE! … No more dolies or William the bear to cuddle and hug … it is all aboard the fairy bus for the dungeons . . . Get your handiwork cracking produce your plastissene for free xpresion . . . Who knows what adventures in work and pla the next term will bring forth. And who cares, eh?”

Certainly not nigel molesworth the curse of st custard’s. For it was he, the reader soon discovers, who stole the cheese from the matron’s mousetrap, dropped the goldfish into the piano, set a bear trap by the fireplace on Christmas Eve, and rendered poor little Eustace Togglington insensible on the very first night of school, while trying out the “nuclear torturer.”

nigel, as readers of Down With Skool! (TIME, Sept. 20, 1954) are still apt to recall in their nightmares, is a sort of cross between Tom Brown and a wombat and looks like all the downtrodden weeds, wets, clots, new bugs, old lags, young ticks, cads, roters, and bulies of the British public school system swept into one messy pile. He alone, as Author Geoffrey Willans and Cartoonist Ronald Searle describe him, is quite enough to account for the current teacher shortage in England.

Verminous Virtuosity. Though the females of his species—the famed belles of St. Trinian’s—are perhaps more deadly, molesworth is more refined. It’s the difference between the cobra and the roach. Rather than crush a master’s skull, this little poobah prefers to nibble at his sanity, and at least in the case of “Sigismund arbuthnot, the mad maths master,” nigel has brilliantly succeeded. In general, he has perfected the art of creeping antisocialism, which has been practiced by boys of every land and time but seldom with such verminous virtuosity.

In How To Be Topp, molesworth is an old lag at st custard’s, and he finds it easy pappy if you can stand the pi-jaw (magisterial yatata). In case it all gets too much, nigel offers the molesworth daydream service (“Are you fatigued? Bored, rundown . . .? Help yourself to a MOLESWORTH DAYDREAM. Simple, easy to operate. No gadgets . . .”). Best among the catalogue of daydreams offered is the one in which the whole school is swept away by the grate st custard’s flood, but molesworth and prudence entwhistle, the beautiful under-matron, survive in a rowboat (“how peaceful it is upon the waters nigel”).

What Every Swot Should Know. Then again, in a more realistic vein he ofers the molesworth bogus report card (“Destroy reel report when it comes along”) and the invaluable molesworth self-adjusting thank-you letter:

“Strike Out words which do not apply.

“Thank you very much for the {train, tractor, germ gun. kite, delicious present*, sweets, space pistol, toy socks . . .}

“My birthday when next present is due is on __________________.”

Finally, in such essays as “Akquire Culture and Keep the Brane Clean,” nigel sets forth not only what every young swot should know, but his own philosophy of life.

On grownups: “Grown ups are wot is left when skool is finished.”

On cricket: “Give me a thumbscrew or slo fire every time.”

On Christmas: “Tiny Tim is a weed.”

On uncles: “We seme to make them nervous and i am not surprised.”

On school in general: “Skool according to headmaster’s pi-jaw is like Life chiz if that is the case wot is the use of going on?”

The true curse of st custard’s, in effect, is not nigel but something called whimsy, which has long been the curse of British humor; but readers on both sides of the Atlantic who are willing to dig through a little of that sticky substance will easily get their molesworth.

* When you can’t remember what it was.