Floreat St Custard's

The other day I included a link to one of Ronald Searle's cartoons from Down With Skool! Here is a the way to the front page of the St Custard's site.

Penguin have recently republished the four Molesworth books as one of their Modern Classics. The introduction by Philip Hensher is very good; certainly, it is much better than the one Tim Rice contributed to the last collected edition.

There is a review of the Penguin volume on the London Review of Books site by Thomas Jones, though he is somewhat out of sympathy with the books. He has a point when he says:

there is something genuinely unsettling about the idea of boarding prep schools - the youngest of these children are only seven - and the great disingenuousness of the Molesworth books is that they appear to exaggerate the institutional horror when their actual effect is to condone the institution.

As they retreat into the past, the mores and institutions of the Empire are becoming increasingly strange to us. Far from the 1950s seeming cosy, they are beginning to look distinctly exotic.