Throughout their marriage, P. G. Wodehouse and his wife Ethel left small notes around the house for each other. Some were affectionate, others more workaday. One from Ethel, written long after her husband had gone to bed, reads as follows:
3.30am
My Darling
Pears for your breakfast and please first
drink the small glass of fresh orange juice.
Took hours to squeeze.
All the love I have.
Bunny1
The tone here says much about this relationship. Ethel’s emotional candour made her a good match for a man who, even in his most personal letters, gave little away. It was a marriage that brought Wodehouse long-lasting happiness, providing him with inspiration, domestic security and a type of loving affection that bordered on the maternal.
Pelham Grenville was born into a very different atmosphere. His was a typical Victorian childhood, where feelings remained unspoken and distances were kept. The third of four sons, he arrived prematurely on 15 October 1881, when his mother was visiting relatives in Guildford [see plate 1]. His first lodgings were unassuming, but behind the façade of the tall Victorian end-of-terrace house at 59 Epsom Road, one of the most remarkable writers of the twentieth century made his entrance.
Though not wealthy, the Wodehouses were established members of that very specific, but long vanished, sector of society – the Victorian ‘gentry’ – defined by its particular ideas of morality, education, status and propriety. The Wodehouse family line itself could be traced back to Agincourt, while his mother’s family, the Deanes, were related to Cardinal Newman. Eleanor displayed a surprisingly romantic streak in her choice of names for her sons. Philip Peveril, her eldest, took his name from Walter Scott’s 1823 novel Peveril of the Peak – an allusion to the fact that he was born overseas, the first white child born on the Peak in Hong Kong. The choices for the two middle sons were less literary but equally striking. Armine was an old family name from the Wodehouse line, while Pelham (always known to his friends as ‘Plum’) was named after his godfather, Colonel Pelham von Donop. But with Wodehouse’s middle name – Grenville – Eleanor once again showed her poetic side, conjuring one of Tennyson’s heroes; and with Richard Lancelot, her youngest child, Eleanor returns to Tennyson and Arthurian legend.
The names might have been unusual, but Wodehouse’s father, Henry Ernest – known as Ernest – was ‘as normal as rice pudding’ and determined to give his sons a childhood to match.2 This was a world of tapioca and high tea, of moral edification and steely discipline. The only thing conspicuously – but critically – missing from Wodehouse’s upbringing was the presence of his parents.
Ernest was one of many ambitious young Victorian men who had chosen to forge a career in the Colonies. After joining the Civil Service in 1867, he had been sent to Hong Kong. A post in such a location was ‘rather like being awarded your Second Eleven colours; for the First Eleven always went to India’.3 Nevertheless, there was much for a civil servant to do in 1860s Hong Kong. Crime flourished, piracy was rife, and the numerous opium dens and brothels needed to be kept under licence. Both the Anglo-Chinese police force and higher-ranking members of the British Administration had been perceived as corrupt, and Whitehall was attempting reforms. Initially appointed as an interpreter, Ernest was given the important job of commanding the Chinese section of the police force.4 He met and married Eleanor Deane in 1877, and soon became a respected magistrate [see plate 3].
After Pelham’s birth, Eleanor took her third son back to ‘The Homestead’, their bungalow in Hong Kong, and for the first two years of his life he was placed in the care of an ‘ayah’, or Chinese nursemaid. Meanwhile, Armine and Peveril were set up in a house in England under the care of a nurse named Emma Roper. Eleanor kept a close eye on the situation, as her parents were living in the house next door. Once Pelham was three years old, he was brought back from Hong Kong to join his brothers. ‘Nanny Roper’ was remembered by Wodehouse as being ‘very severe in her manner, making the boys dress formally every day and keeping them spotlessly clean’.5 Some firmness was probably necessary; a childhood friend recalled that the ‘little Wodehouses’, especially Pelham, were ‘very naughty’ [see plate 2].6 A few years later, the children were moved on to what was known as a ‘Dame School’ – a privately run establishment in a family home, in which small numbers of children received education and accommodation. Overseen by the Prince sisters, and based in Croydon, a suburb of South London, ‘Elmhurst’ (as it was later known) catered specifically for the families of colonial civil servants. Later, Wodehouse remembered his Croydon school as the place in which he first encountered the feisty nature of the Cockney housemaid, immortalised in figures such as Uncle Dynamite’s Elsie Bean.7
Many Victorian children whose parents were British nationals overseas received this sort of education in loco parentis. Indeed, separation from one’s parents under such circumstances was the norm. The climate of the tropics was hazardous for infants, and Hong Kong had particularly acute problems in terms of drainage and sanitary provision. Parental leave was at four- or five-year intervals, and travel from Hong Kong to England by ship took over two months. A number of children endured far worse than Wodehouse. The young Kipling, a decade earlier, was sent back from Bombay at the age of three, and was cruelly treated. Looking back on the sudden separation from his parents, Kipling recalls the experience as akin to having ‘lost all [his] world’.8 Wodehouse, by contrast, reflected cheerfully on his early years. He had, he admits, no shortage of familial contact. Holidays from school were spent visiting his numerous relatives. The Wodehouse boys had no fewer than fifteen uncles and twenty aunts. But this was contact of a desultory sort:
Looking back, I can see that I was just passed from hand to hand. It was an odd life with no home to go to, but I have always accepted everything that happens to me in a philosophical spirit; and I can’t remember ever having been unhappy in those days. My feeling now is that it was very decent of those aunts to put up three small boys for all those years. We can’t have added much entertainment to their lives. The only thing you could say for us is that we never gave any trouble.9
Wodehouse’s breeziness is accented by his characteristically ‘decent’ understatement. Things in his world are always ‘odd’ rather than ‘terrible’. But sadness seeps through. The Wodehouse children sound like so much unwanted luggage. There is a touch of strained parody about the final phrase – ‘we never gave any trouble’ – as if the voices of many disapproving aunts are still ringing in his ears. Perhaps most significant is the thin comfort blanket of amnesia: ‘I can’t remember ever having been unhappy’. There were, one suspects, muffled tears at bedtime for his own ‘lost world’, preface to emotional withdrawal.
For even by Victorian standards, Ernest and Eleanor’s absence was a long one. The separation was to create a coolness between Wodehouse and Eleanor. ‘We looked upon mother’, he recalls, ‘more like an aunt. She came home very infrequently’.10 The fact that there are no extant letters between Wodehouse and his parents, either from his childhood or from his later life, may indicate something about these particular relationships. While it is not clear what sort of correspondent Eleanor Wodehouse might have been, she was, by all accounts, a distant and unsentimental mother.
This question of emotional containment echoes through Wodehouse’s writing. Brought up in the midst of the Victorian cult of childhood, Wodehouse would have been surrounded by commodified images such as the Pears’ Soap ‘Bubbles’ boy, and the lisping ‘sweet innocence’ of the children’s classic Helen’s Babies.11 Those of tender years, in Wodehouse’s fiction, are portrayed with less sentiment. ‘I can’t handle anything except rather tough children, if I am to get comedy’, Wodehouse admitted.12 For Wodehouse, being a child – and being tough – went hand in hand.
While he kept his sons at arm’s length, Ernest Wodehouse planned their education with some care, particularly as his second son, Armine, was seen to be academically brilliant. Pelham was left more to his own devices, and read children’s popular works voraciously. I was ‘soaked in Anstey’s stuff’, he recalls.13 Familiar with Victorian classics such as Tom Brown’s School Days, he also read and loved the moral bestseller Eric, or Little by Little, and was gripped by the school stories which appeared in the weekly penny magazine The Boy’s Own Paper.14
But even in his earliest years Wodehouse went a step beyond the average schoolboy, independently tackling Pope’s translation of the Iliad at the age of six, and writing his own brand of epic ‘poertory’, of which a remnant survives:
In 1889, a change was called for. Peveril, Wodehouse’s eldest brother, was suffering from a ‘weak chest’, and the Wodehouse children were moved to a school in Guernsey as part of a ‘package deal’, where they might ‘benefit’ from the sea air. Wodehouse remembers it as ‘a delightful place. […] My recollections are all of wandering about the island.’ The only disappointment, he recalls, was ‘the awful steamer trips back to England for the holiday’.
Vacations, Wodehouse recalls, would be spent with ‘various aunts, some of whom I liked but one or two were very formidable Victorian women’.15 Wodehouse was aware that he should ‘Never complain!’ He chose, instead to ‘note every detail and write it down’.16 The young Wodehouse may not have always had a pencil to hand, but it is clear from his fiction that he was continually observing his surroundings, and making mental notes, particularly on the matter of Aunts. It is, of course, Bertie Wooster who is most particularly plagued by the Auntly phenomenon – and his confrontation with an intimidating vista at Deverill Hall has something of a child’s perspective about it:
As far as the eye could reach, I found myself gazing on a surging sea of aunts. There were tall aunts, short aunts, stout aunts, thin aunts, and an aunt who was carrying on a conversation in a low voice to which nobody seemed to be paying the slightest attention.17
Bertie’s Aunt Agatha, ‘the nephew-crusher’ who ‘chews broken bottles and kills rats with her teeth’, was, Wodehouse later confirmed, his Aunt Mary Deane, ‘the scourge of my childhood’.18 Another Deane sister, Louisa, was one of the models for the kindlier Aunt Dahlia.
‘In this life’, as Bertie phlegmatically muses, ‘it is not aunts that matter but the courage which one brings to them’.19 Indeed, Wodehouse’s familiarity with the figure of the aunt was a felicitous coincidence for a comic writer. For the relationship’s distance allowed him to exploit the plot potential of the family structure with a light touch. As Richard Usborne notes, ‘[i]t is funny when Bertie slides down drainpipes, or to America, to escape his Aunt Agatha’s wrath. It would be sad if he were thus frightened by his mother’.20
Being a nephew, for Wodehouse, brought other literary benefits. Wodehouse’s aunts did a great deal of visiting, particularly as four of them were vicars’ wives. Wodehouse was often taken along on these social rounds, which included making calls to the local Great Houses. ‘Even at the age of ten’, Wodehouse remembers, ‘ I was a social bust, contributing little or nothing to the feast of reason and flow of soul. […] There always came a moment when my hostess, smiling one of those painful smiles, suggested that it would be nice for your little nephew to go and have tea in the servants’ hall. And she was right. I loved it. My mind today is fragrant with memories of kindly footmen and vivacious parlour-maids. In their society, I forgot to be shy and kidded back and forth with the best of them. […] Sooner or later in would come the butler […] “The young gentleman is wanted”, he would say morosely, and the young gentleman would shamble out’.21 It was in this way that Wodehouse gained so much knowledge of the life of servants behind the baize door. Characters such as the portly Beach, the Blandings butler, Angus McAllister, the gardener and ‘human mule’, and the chef Anatole, ‘God’s gift to the gastric juices’, all owe their provenance to these childhood visits.
At twelve, Wodehouse was moved from Guernsey to a small private school at Kearsney, near Dover. ‘I was supposed to be going into the Navy’, he recalls.22 The school was not a success at the time, but Wodehouse was later to use Malvern House as the alma mater of Bertie Wooster and several of his friends. Armine, meanwhile, was sent to a more academic boarding school in South London, Dulwich College. It was on another of Wodehouse’s unhappy holidays, paying a visit to his elder brother, that Wodehouse first saw and fell in love with Dulwich. He pleaded with his father to allow him to attend. It was to be the beginning of ‘six years of unbroken bliss’.23
1 Ethel Wodehouse to PGW, u.d. (Wodehouse Archive).
2 Over Seventy (1957), repr. in Wodehouse on Wodehouse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 474.
3 Benny Green, P. G. Wodehouse: A Literary Biography (New York: Rutledge, 1981), p. 8.
4 See Colin Crisswell and Mike Watson, The Royal Hong Kong Police Force (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 57.
5 David Jasen, Portrait of a Master (New York: Mason & Lipscomb, 1974), p. 5.
6 P. G. Wodehouse, Notes and Phrases (Wodehouse Archive).
7 See N. T. P. Murphy, The Wodehouse Handbook, Vol. I (London: Popgood & Groolley, 2006), p. 16.
8 Rudyard Kipling, ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’, The Week’s News (Allahabad), 21 December 1888.
9 Jasen, p. 8.
10 Jasen, p. 5.
11 The comment about Helen’s Babies is George Orwell’s. See ‘Riding Down from Bangor’, Tribune, 22 November 1946.
12 PGW to Paul Reynolds, 3 December 1937 (Columbia).
13 PGW to Richard Usborne, 9 May 1958 (Wodehouse Archive).
14 PGW to Richard Usborne, 3 June 1955 (Wodehouse Archive).
15 Jasen, p. 8.
16 This was P. G. Wodehouse’s adult advice to a ten-year-old German girl, Reinhild von Bodenhausen, in 1941. See P. G. Wodehouse: The Unknown Years (Stamford Lake: Sri Lanka, 2009), p. 14.
17 P. G. Wodehouse, The Mating Season (1949), Chapter 1.
18 PGW to Richard Usborne, 14 January 1955 (Wodehouse Archive).
19 The Mating Season, Chapter 1.
20 Richard Usborne, Wodehouse at Work (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1961), p. 31.
21 Over Seventy, p. 512.
22 PGW to Richard Usborne, 1 September 1956 (Wodehouse Archive).
23 Over Seventy, p. 477.