Rum cove, really

摘要

A good test of almost any book is to ask whether one would not be better off reading a work by P.G. Wodehouse, and the answer, in this reviewer's opinion, is nearly always "Yes." Robert McCrum, however, has written a book that provokes the answer "Perhaps not." This is high praise indeed. In many respects Wodehouse was a deeply ordinary man. Born, in 1881, into a "good" family of colonial administrators, he was brought up in England, largely under the auspices of nannies, relations and schoolmasters. Between the ages of three and 15, he saw his parents, who were doing their bit for the empire in Hong Kong, for a total of barely six months. Starved of maternal affection, he grew to treat emotions as dangerous but discovered that sport, and animals, could be substitutes of a kind. Fortunately, school, in particular his public (ie, secondary) school, Dulwich College, was wonderful. Here, for six happy years, he learnt classics, developed a passion for grammar and became something of an athlete. But he emerged a shy young man with few friends, whose hopes of going on to Oxford were dashed when his father, somewhat inexplicably, pleaded poverty. Instead, Wodehouse entered a bank, which he loathed.