Public skool monkey business

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I misjudged this book. I thought the airport fiction promised by the literary editor would take me nicely to New York, where I was going the next day. However, at 846 pages, weighing in at one kilo, Jilly Cooper’s Wicked! is long enough to get you to Australia. On my second evening in America the waitress, after reciting in a sing-song monologue the specials for the evening, added, ‘And I also must recommend that you see Wicked, the musical, while you’re here.’ ‘What’s so good about it?’ I asked. ‘Oh, the flying monkeys,’ she said. ‘They’re marvellous and they really fly.’ It turned out to be a different Wicked. There are no flying monkeys in this book, although plenty of monkey business, some of which is described below.

Jilly Cooper’s tale of two schools adds another famous public school to the list of those in which fictions have been set. Rugby has Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Sherborne The Loom of Youth and Shrewsbury Bending of a Twig. Eton and Sherborne share le Carré’s Murder of Quality and Fettes inspired Ian Hay’s wonderfully funny Lighter Side of School Life. It is the immaculate playing-fields, mansion, lake and golf course of Radley which are brought to mind by Bagley, Jilly Cooper’s co-educational boarding-school patronised by over-rich and over-sexed parents with offspring who take after them.

Headmasters, P. G. Wodehouse once pointed out, come in two classes: ‘the workers and the runners-up-to-London.’ Bagley’s headmaster is in a third category. His principal occupations — how unlike those of the Wardens of Radley I have known — are scheming to become Secretary of State for Education and plotting the seduction of the local comprehensive headmistress. He finally pulls off the second of these aims during a joint field-trip to a castle in Wales, where the two heads frolic on a four-poster bed while their pupils do several hundred thousand pounds’ worth of damage trashing the rooms below.