Given that the intended audience for this book is or was a) male b) about 10 years old and c) born in the 30s, I really didn't expect to enjoy it as much as I did, but it's strangely irresistible.
Firstly, it goes along at a rollicking pace. Within the first 30 pages we have a cricket match most foully thrown by a jealous bully, a rescue of a smaller boy from said bully, a rescue of the same boy (Teddy Lester) from a lion's cage (I mean - really?) and the stranding of the rescuer and his grate frend Arthur in a cave by the bully while the tide is coming in.
Especially dangerous as no-one knows they're there because the sea is out of bounds to the schoolboys. Presumably in case they drown.
Or perhaps in case they get attacked by a giant squid, as within a very few pages more, this is exactly what happens to the grate frend. Luckily the first plucky youngster (Tom Sandys, who we later find is as much a whiz at rugby as he is at cricket) has a knife and is able to save a chum from a grisly fate yet again.
I was expecting quicksand or something in chapter five but Finnemore (who was a schoolmaster himself) settles down a bit into football matches in corridors and chimney fires and quite uncomfortable amounts of corporal punishment - that's not just my modern-day sensibilities btw, the author is quite clear about what happens when the wrong sort of boy becomes a prefect and is allowed to 'whop' smaller boys, and how the one in Teddy's dorm is victimising a particularly delicate and nervous boy, inventing reasons to punish him because he suffers more from it than the others do.
The other boys describe him as a sneak and a bully - I think adults would have a different way of describing it, and although said prefect is not removed from his post when the masters find out how harsh he's being, he knows he's being watched.
This is clearly insufficient - but eventually, thankfully, he's expelled anyway as it turns out he's running a gambling racket. It also turns out Teddy Lester is a sort of Simon Templar figure, the kind who likes breaking rules but has his own strong moral code, not telling tales on people but ensuring they trip themselves up and get caught.
He's also too good to be true in other ways. Witness this paragraph after he and his friends get into trouble:
'It was not his own punishment he grieved over; he did not care the toss of a button for that. It was the punishment he had brought upon the two friends to whom he was so devoted.'
So when he saves the headmaster's wife and children from a road traffic accident, it is for his friends he pleads.
This is perfect for children of course. When you're a child you want the baddies to be bad, and eventually get their comeuppance, and the heroes to be stalwart and save people from danger.
Actually, even as an adult, it's nice to see that sometimes.
So, despite the fact I could list quite a few other things that should have put me off - that the boys seem to have been taught to settle arguments with their fists rather than their brains, the whole 'school spirit' nonsense that I frankly had no time for even as a kid, and a lengthy description of another ruddy cricket match with some absolutely baffling-to-me terminology:
'Ryder was a school bowler, the best trundler in the first eleven, and he possessed a fast yorker of very deadly qualities, made much more formidable by being mixed up in the most unexpected fashion among leg-breaks'
I had great fun reading this book. I'd happily read the next in the series if it came my way.
More books reviewed for the 1949 club can be found on the blogs of Simon and Karen, who run the club every six months.
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