I Blame it All on Mr V.

(from 2011)

I blame it all on Mr V.

Mr V was our form tutor for three years in junior school. A florid faced man, he’d been a pilot during the Second World War, and was known to hurl blackboard rubbers across the class room with deadly accuracy. He probably would not have lasted long in teaching today.

But I liked Mr V, and I liked the fact that he read stories to us some afternoons. One such story he attempted, was Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat.

Mr V did try. He would start one of Jerome’s anecdotes – Uncle Podger trying to put up a picture, or Hampton Court Maze, and would dissolve into laughter, with tears streaming down his face, watched by a mixed group of slightly puzzled nine year olds.

Later, when I was 12, my father took me out for the day and bought me the first Penguin edition of Three Men. I still have that battered volume today. A youthful hand has amended Jerome’s features with a bushy beard and a pair of Buddy Holly spectacles, and the misnomer “perfect binding” as used for paperbacks resulted in what is best described as a “loose leaf” publication – but there is no way I will part with it.

Jerome K Jerome was a product of history. The compulsory education of all children in late Victorian Britain resulted in a new class of author –less than middle class – with new themes for the masses who purchased books and journals at the Railway bookstall. Pompous critics of the day dubbed Jerome as ‘Arry K ‘Arry – because of his use of slang of the “lower classes”, but much of his style had echoes of Dickens and Austen. A clever use of language – the English understatement for serious matters and overstatement for trivialities – made his best books readable and re-readable.

Jerome had a mixed life. After disastrous family fortunes, grim poverty, then numerous jobs including being a less than successful actor - he later wrote several amusing volumes about “The Stage” – things started looking up. Three Men, written when he had recently returned from honeymoon, is his most consistent humorous book – a trip by three men (and a dog) up the River Thames in a skiff – with various anecdotal digressions. They get so far, the weather gets worse and they give up. That’s about it. If that bald description puts you off, try it. You will either laugh and love it, or as one friend to whom I heartily recommended it complained – “but it doesn’t have any story...”

Once established, Jerome edited two journals and wrote numerous other books and plays. Nearly all have been forgotten, although when they all conveniently went out of copyright in Britain in the 1970s, about a dozen were republished. Some still have parts that are very funny – my favourite are the essays that bulked out Diary of a Pilgrimage (1891).

Like many others, Jerome was not happy to be a humorist. Like the clown who yearns to play Hamlet, he yearned for what he viewed as more worthy achievements. He wrote serious books – some quite good, and a couple after sad experiences in the First World War, quite dreadful – all of which have sunk without trace, apart from aficionados and completists and Project Gutenberg. He wrote a quasi religious play, The Passing of the Third Floor Back (1908), which ran and ran and is still occasionally revived by amateur societies today. Alma Reville (Mrs Alfred Hitchcock) wrote the screenplay for a 1935 film version, starring Conrad Viedt, which not surprisingly added a bit of death and destruction that Jerome would not have recognized.

From my first acquisition as a 12 year old I went on to collect Jerome seriously. There was a second-hand bookshop in Ealing that put volumes away for me for when I returned to London. I would turn up after perhaps six months away and they would always remember me – which was nice. They also saved books of a certain religious group for me as well. One rare Jerome volume came from a friend in the film industry – a lady preserved forever in a bit part in Calvalcanti’s Nicholas Nickleby (1947). I joined the Jerome K Jerome Society and wrote for their journal.

So this is my ramble on Jerome K Jerome. He rambled too – that was his style. No one could call it great art, but something that makes you laugh, or even just smile a bit, can’t be too bad a thing.

As I said, I blame it all on Mr V.