So headmasters sa, but when my bat is strate i still get bowled is that an omen chiz. Keep yore bat strate boy and all will be all right in life as in criket. I think there is hope.Molesworth on criketThere is only one thing in criket and that is the STRATE BAT. think Molesworth is ’sublime’ are missing a different point: and they’re bound to, because they did read it at school.” And St Custard’s is now impossibly distant from the present state of education.But then I only have to remember that, of the half-dozen or so men and women of letters who I know revere the molesworth books, only one – myself – was privately educated. A very unamused piece in the London Review of Books about the Penguin Modern Classics edition asserted that “people who did read it at school probably think I’m missing the point, and of course I am – in fact, I can’t fail to, because I didn’t read it at school – but I’d say that those who … And he repli i simply couldn’t agree with you more rat face but peason is very 4th rate and hav not got beyond bulldog drummond.” As to whether I would sacrifice the entire works of Aldous Huxley, never mind just Point Counterpoint, in order to preserve the molesworth books, that is a question that answers itself as soon as it is posed.I wonder, though, whether they will survive in children’s minds for another 50 years. Or this dialogue from the lunch table between molesworth and his grate friend peason: “i think aldous huxley is rather off form in point counterpoint, peason.

“Nearer and nearer crept the ghastly THING” runs the caption underneath a nightmare vision of molesworth’s head on a giant spider’s body; the drawing has no textual referent, but just pops up in the way images do to the idling mind. At which point I realise I am beginning to use the kind of language that Willans skewers so deftly whenever intellectual matters are discussed.”Advanced, forthright, signifficant”, is molesworth’s snap estimation of Colin Wilson, and the words often spring to my own lips when I read something which is rather obviously trying too hard. The spindly lines, the blots, the pitiless execution of caricature, made his younger readers feel that they had found a new ally in the war against education. The targets in “Know the Enemy, or Masters at a Glance” might no longer be the same – after 50 years of educational reform, how could they be – but the psychological types the drawings depict are still all around us (“No. By the time I first reached the end of the portrait section (“Gosh chiz this is molesworth 2 my bro he is uterly wet and a weed it panes me to think i am of the same blud”) I had accepted that Searle knew exactly what was my preferred style of draughtsmanship.

The spirit of tolerance, you fool,” barks an intolerant-looking master. What is remarkable is that Searle does not overdo the intolerance – the master looks as though he has lost his good temper only after years of attrition.)As in so much of childhood, molesworth escapes into reverie and dream; and the drawings substantiate that reverie, making the internal graphic fantasy of the schoolboy mind visible and real. He is unblessed by beauty but has all the rotund integrity of Dr Johnson. The combination of Willans and Searle, on the other hand, is like two children on different sides of the street, calling out to each other but heading for the same destination.That this is a collaboration is evident from the first page: “This is me e.g.

nigel molesworth” begins Down with Skool!, underneath a portrait of the narrator. Searle’s ability to set down a character is striking from the word go. molesworth looks at us askance, his lips set in an enigmatic half-frown, the eyes infinitely knowing behind their glasses. I can think of no work, except perhaps Alice in Wonderland, where illustration and content are on such good terms with each other.