A Prefect's Uncle
P.G. Wodehouse
Jaico Publishing House. First published 1903.
A very early PGW story, maybe written when he was in the London bank just after he finished schooling at Dulwich. The public school atmosphere is fresh and innocent and sweet, and feeds a peculiar nostalgia for a life and experiences I have never actually had. The plot in this book ostensibly turns on the fact of one of the prefects (i.e. a near-God) of the school having an uncle who is much younger than him and joins the school in a junior class. But the comic events surrounding that fact are just one of the three or four story lines followed in the book, all of them, dealing with social interactions in the setting of a 'public' school, a large number of them involving sports. (There is lot of cricket, and some rugby football.) It's however the language that's so good, and there are several boys whose dialogue is like later PGW heroes. Compared to these stories, other popular school stories like the 'Billy Bunter' stuff or the Enid Blyton girls' school stories are positively puerile.
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