By Robert Bruce

We gathered early by Platform three in Victoria station. We had been told that we had to be there at ten o’clock sharp with tickets already purchased and in hand. So we were all there on the dot. But then we noticed that our chairman, Norman Murphy, wasn’t. Such faith had we in his omnicompetence that we stopped talking about the Queen Mother’s Birthday Pageant the day before, (when fleetingly Edward Cazalet had appeared on a race horse), and assumed that there must be another Platform three lurking elsewhere. But then Norman appeared, we made for the train, and clattered through south London.

The sun shone on Dulwich and as we descended the steps we imagined the days, not much different to now, when, as in Sam The Sudden, City men galloped up the station steps to miss their train in the morning. We stopped briefly at the kiosk where Wodehouse used to buy his copy of The Strand magazine. Norman briefly pointed out a tree where you might rescue a cat and then clambered up onto the protective railings by the road junction and, holding onto the traffic lights, started talking. Half the company shouted at him to take care and get down. The other half shouted at him to hold the pose until they could get a photograph. He told us about how the No 3 bus, a hundred years on, still plies the same route. There were murmurings that some of the people at the bus stop looked as though they had been waiting for almost that long.

But these subsided as Norman launched into the tale of the first Wodehouse family home, long since demolished, on the nearby corner. Back in 1899 this was a quiet corner of London. Where a block of flats now stood there had been a pond with two swans, Edgar and Percy in Big Money, on it. ‘Follow me carefully’, Norman exhorted. And soon we were walking past a house very similar to that which Wodehouse had lived in. Then it was on past an estate agent, which had been there since 1870. Several members crossed the road and collected the latest list of Dulwich havens for sale and started dreaming. The tour straggled on past the site of the Alleyn Arms, where Wodehouse used to have lunch before watching the school matches.

At this point a crisis arose. Up ahead Norman was well into his stride about the beehives which used to be in situ alongside the short cut to the railway in Acacia Grove. But several streets back at the house which he had pointed out as being similar to the one in which Wodehouse had lived the knot of people taking photographs had alerted the owners to the fact that something outwith the normal drowsy Dulwich day was taking place. They had opened the door and asked what on earth all these people with cameras were doing. On hearing of the Wodehouse connection they had asked them in to have a look and were now serving cups of coffee and passing plates of cakes around. A severe delay to the morning’s work was threatened.

Somehow the cakes were bolted, the coffee gulped and the kind people thanked. By this time Norman was well into his stride up Acacia Grove pointing out houses which had lions flanking the doorways. At one the lions were found to be wearing, respectively, a bowler hat and a pith helmet. This was explained by the affable chap in the front garden who was himself wearing a panama hat and having a bit of a prune at the roses. He turned out to be one Anthony Boyle, who had been at Oxford with Norman and had been alerted to the invasion. The motley crew of Wodehouseans, hailing from all over the world, now felt they were true sons of Dulwich village as they practised their ability to lean over a fence and chat about gardens with someone in a panama hat and secateurs.

Then we arrived at the real Peacehaven of Mulberry Grove from which Mike Jackson started out on his first day at work. Wodehouse described the sphinxes as looking as though they were recovering from a bad attack of jaundice. To us it looked as though someone had just painted them a new coat of startling white. The camera shutters chattered.

Norman set out at a fair pace back down the road. A renegade group gathered to inspect a fuschia-festooned front garden. But conflict was avoided and we eventually followed in Mike Jackson’s footsteps under the railway bridge and through the little black gate into Dulwich college. ‘This’, said Norman gesturing at the school buildings in the distance, ‘was the view that Wodehouse never forgot. This was his real home. He may have left school in 1900 but he was always coming back. It was the most important thing in his life.’

Thrilled Wodehouseans swarmed through the grove of trees where Mike Jackson mused sadly about his lot. ‘When Mike Jackson visited the school grounds that night in Psmith in the City, said Norman, ‘Wodehouse switched from description to memory and described landmarks Mike Jackson could not have known’. Several members stretched out under the trees and drank in the tranquil scene. Others continued to leaf through the estate agent’s list with greater urgency.

On the steps of the pavilion Norman told the assembled group of the stirring deeds of the P G Wodehouse Society’s cricket team, The Gold Bats, in the annual match against the masters’ team, The Dulwich Dusters. He told them of mighty victories, and deceitful defeats. He told them of Robert Bruce’s extraordinary trouser arrangements and the lengths of elastic required. He told them of Mrs Henderson, the eye-catching Italian teacher and how disappointed this year’s team had been to find her fielding in a proper pair of Steve Waugh Autograph cricket trousers rather than the fondly-remembered shorts of previous years. At this point the college bell struck 11 and Norman closed his eyes. ‘The bell in the clock tower which Mike Jackson heard ringing so many times on that sad evening,’ he said.

But then he perked up and as we headed across the cricket field to the main buildings kept us happy with stories about such people as Wodehouse’s great friend Westbrook, who had pawned Plum’s banjo and then lost the ticket.

We had a tour of the library. We lingered, noses pressed against the glass, at the replica of Wodehouse’s study which Lady Wodehouse presented to the school. We gazed at the sturdy typewriter whose simple mechanisms had produced plots of such intricacy and language of such clarity and humour. We looked at the pipes standing ready for moments of musing. And we saw the fragment of school honours board which has the Wodehouse name emblazoned along with his fellow members of the First XI of that cricketing summer so long ago.

Some of the treasures of the library were brought out for us to see. Manuscripts of his post-war troubles, first editions of the school stories and, of course, his cash book, were perused and pored over. The entry: September 9^th 1902 ‘Chuck bank. This month I start my journalistic career’ was saluted as the great portent of joy to come.

At this point several people, having noted that the cricket photographs of those days were taken outside the school’s main doors, suggested that we should recreate the scene. So we did, with our chairman, panama hat plonked on head and pipe in mouth, sitting in the middle. Then we made our way out of the grounds and passed another house where Wodehouse had stayed during his schooldays. This was the one where he had invented ‘Po’, a jape involving windows, string and chamber pots, which, so Norman told us, is why the school changed from porcelain to metal chamber pots the following term.

With that fact ringing in our ears we made our way back to the station, pretended that we were buying copies of The Strand, rather than The Times, took a last look at where the beehives might have been and boarded the train back into the centre of London.