Boys will be Boys

September’s Wodehouse selection was an early collection of stories set at St. Austin’s, the fictional school that was also the setting for his earlier school days idylls.  About two stories in, I got an odd sense of déjà vu.  It was impossible that I had read the stories before, because the only Wodehouse books I had read prior to this were Jeeves and Wooster stories.  From what I can tell, these stories were never adapted for television, unlike the brilliant versions put on by Fry and Laurie.¹  Despite all of my rationalizing, I could not shake the sensation that there was something very familiar about the exploits of British schoolboys.

Then it hit me, a wave of nostalgia so strong that I almost felt a little queasy.  There was a very good reason for all of this.  I attended graduate school in the UK.  To make ends meet, I was a Junior Dean at my college, responsible for the welfare of over 400 students, poor things.  I’m pleased to say that in my four years on the job, I never lost one of the little buggers.  During that time, though, I did encounter more than one episode of high-spirited shenanigans.  The rugby team, in particular, was particularly active.  The year before I was appointed, the team was suspended for some goings-on that occurred after one of their infamous team dinners. 

It was an unusual position to be in.  There were a few other deans, but I was the only American.  There was the added feeling that we were not undergraduates, but neither were we quite proper staff as well, because as we were students as well, and not much older than the undergraduates.  My main goal was to remind these nascent adults about the rules concerning mature behavior.  This was easier said than done in a country where the drinking age is 18 and the college had its own cheap subsidized bar.  So while reading about young men flouting the boundaries of the school and weaseling out of examinations, I was torn.²  Part of me cheered on our heroes, but another part, the tiny bit that will always be a Junior Dean on patrol, felt sorry for the housemasters.

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¹I was very excited recently when I head that the BBC was adapting the Blandings Castle stories for television, to be broadcast soon.  I’m hoping that they are picked by PBS or BBC America, because otherwise I will have to concoct a plan to escape to the UK for the broadcasts. Unfortunately, this is probably impossible on a fiscal level, given that all of my spare funds are consumed by daycare and diapers.

² Talking about examinations reminds me about the time I was asked to invigilate a student who had to have a transcription taken of his finals papers.  The problem was that the examiners could not read his handwriting, so he had to pay not only for a typist to take his dictation, but for me to be in the room to make certain that everything was above board and that he was not amending wheat he had written (although how they expected me to do that since the handwriting was illegible is beyond me).  At one of our breaks, he seemed very pleased and I asked him if he was annoyed by having to do this.  He replied that, to the contrary, he had expected something like this to happen.  He knew that he could only get everything in that he wanted to say by writing illegibly.  Far from being a punishment, he was thrilled that he had been able to write everything he had wanted.  I forget his final grade, but I will never forget that he was a lawyer in training.