Leadership and the Curse of St. Custard’s

Modern life is full of complexity, chaos, and contradictions. In our efforts to cope, some succumb to despair, while others take solace in the knowledge that ’twas ever thus.

With Spring on the horizon—if not yet in the air or step—everyone is busy preparing for the new season. Squirrels are digging up last Fall’s nuts, pigeons coo on the fire escape, and our poet, C. Langley Dunwood, is hard at work on her poetic manifesto, along with a lyric or two for her next collection of slim verse, provisionally titled Follow. 

Meanwhile, Tim Endibel, head of school at Wayward St. Etheldreda’s Academy—still locked in a mighty tussle for survival with the Board—has been refining his introduction to the school’s new strategic plan. It boldly charts a new course, tackling challenges with courage and conviction, while offering a measure of empathy and inclusion, plus some belonging for those who require it.

The Leadership Imperative

Tim is particularly pleased that his article The Leadership Imperative – Radical Empowerment and Ambiguous Transparency —in Schools, has just been accepted for publication in the prestigious Pinnacle Review (formerly The Private School Gazette). Meanwhile, the new online Viewbook is progressing nicely, the French department has agreed to hold off on non-binary pronouns, enrollment numbers are trailing budget projections by no more than ten percent, and, to his great relief, the recent outbreak of stomach flu was traced not to the school cafeteria but to the corner food cart. At last, things might be looking up.

Problem Solving

In his thinking, Tim might have benefitted by the insights of Nigel Molesworth, who long ago summed up the existential dilemma faced by the young:

“Wot a lot of problems we dere little chaps hav to face – there are H-bombs, missiles, spacemen, russians, yanks, electronik branes …” (Willans and Searle 337).

And in his wisdom, Molesworth asks:

“Wot would everyone say if we schoolboys behaved like the nations of the globe? I will tell you. They would sa we were stupid, crass, ignorant, hopeless, wet, weedy and sans un clue. And yet it goes on.”

Proust

World-weary, subversive, ink-besplattered, inventive dreamer, survivor Nigel Molesworth is the anti-hero we need in these difficult times. His attitude—cynical, realistic, sardonic, practical, and dark—comes from hard-won experience. He resists authority, having learned early on that it is no use trying to please it. He has developed high levels of resilience and adaptability.

Now GRIMES stands on the platform, smiling horribly at the pitiable collection of oiks, snakes, cads, oafs, and dirty rotters below.
‘And wot,’ sa GRIMES, ‘hav we all been reading in the hols?’
Tremble tremble. Moan drone. I hav read nothing but Red the Redskin and Guide to the Pools. I hav also sat with my mouth open watching Lassie, Wonder Horse, etc., on t.v. How to escape? But I hav made a plan.
‘Fotherington-Thomas,’ sa GRIMES, ‘wot hav you read?’
‘IvanhoeTheVicarofWakefieldWutheringHeightsTreasureIslandVanityFairWest wardHoTheWaterBabies and—’
‘That is enuff. Good boy. And Molesworth?’
He grin horribly.
‘What hav you read, Molesworth?’
Gulp gulp. A rat in a trap.
‘Proust, sir.’
‘Come agane?’
‘Proust, sir. A grate Fr. writer. The book in question was Swann’s Way.’
‘Gorblimey. Wot did you think of it, eh?’
‘The style was exquisite, sir, and the characterisation superb. The long evocative passages—’
‘SILENCE!’ thunder GRIMES. ‘There is no such book, impertinent boy. I shall hav to teach you culture the hard way. Report for the kane after prayers.’

Chiz chiz. To think I hav learned all that by hart. It’s not fair—they get you every way. And so our first day ends when we join together singing our own skool song.

(Chiz, of course, is a noun meaning cheat or swindle, and an epithet, as in “skool sossages hav been replaced by prunes, chiz.”)

Football and Philosophy

It is experiences like this that hav turned young Nigel Molesworth—the self-styled Curse of St. Custard’s—into a philosopher and a survivor. Here he is on the football field with his friend, the wet and weedy Basil Fotherington-Thomas. It is probably a second XI match with rival school Porridge Court:

 “Wot is yore opinion of colin wilson, the new philosopher?” sa fotherington-tomas, hanging by his weedy heels from the crossbar.
“Advanced, forthright, signifficant,” i repli, kicking off the mud from my footer boots.
“He takes, i think, the place of t.s. eliot in speaking for the younger generation.  Have you any idea of the score?”
“Not a clue.”
“Those rufians hav interrupted us six times.  So one must assume half a dozen goles.  If only our defence was more lively, quicker on the tackle!  Now as i was saing about colin wilson…..”

Fair-minded as always, Molesworth understands that others think differently, but his insight and self-awareness are, as ever, acute. He accepts his own failings just as he adeptly notices them in others.

Football or Fish

He has some sharp observations about types of games masters—especially those who shout unhelpfully from the sidelines.

This is how a good school can build character in the young.

Someone should send The Compleet Molesworth to Tim Endibel. 

Literary Endnote

As a critic of a certain era commented in the now defunct literary quarterly The Fragmentum:

Much like Eliot’s The Waste Land, the Molesworth corpus is a triumph of heteroglossia, a dazzling interplay of disparate voices, registers, and intertextual allusions that coalesce into a text at once anarchic and profoundly sophisticated. Willans, with an astute ear for linguistic pastiche, orchestrates a polyphonic riot in which the demotic cadences of schoolboy vernacular collide with the bombast of pedagogic authority, producing a literary artifact of startling textual complexity.

What I once consumed in childhood as mere comic mischief now reveals itself, upon mature re-examination, as a rich palimpsest of linguistic play and satirical incision. The absurdist mayhem and linguistic fragmentation—so lapidary in execution—mirror a broader cultural entropy, a dissolution of meaning evocative of the very conditions Bakhtin explored in his theorization of the carnivalesque and dialogic discourse. That the Molesworth texts achieve such an effect within the ostensibly parochial confines of a mid-century preparatory school satire only underscores their brilliance.

– Dorian Leclair, in The Fragmentum (1994)

No chiz.