Quotations from P G Wodehouse are copyright of, and reprinted by permission of, the Trustees of the Wodehouse Estate © 2012 The P G Wodehouse Society (UK)

Never a Dul moment

by Ian Alexander-Sinclair

Elin Murphy led us on this walk around Wodehouse's Dulwich (aka Valley Fields) in south London, on the afternoon of 9th July, 2007. Another group of Weekers had the tour the following morning. As Norman Murphy's written introduction, distributed to us in the train as we drew out of Victoria Station, reminded us, Wodehouse wrote in his introduction to the 1972 edition of Sam the Sudden:

"It was the first thing of mine where the action took place in the delectable suburb of Valley Fields, a thin disguise for the Dulwich where so many of my happiest hours have been spent. In the course of a longish life I have flitted about a bit. I have had homes in Mayfair, in Park Avenue, New York, in Beverly Hills, California, and other posh localities, but I have always been a suburbanite at heart, and it is when I get a plot calling for a suburban setting that I really roll up my sleeves and give of my best."

West Dulwich railway station is only a short journey from Victoria, but in Wodehouse's time it had the look of a country station. The station buildings have changed since then and there are no longer cabbages and beehives on the bank, past which we walked up into Park Road, although Norman tells us the beehives had survived until the 1970s. The newspaper kiosk on Park Road is still there but gives the impression that it is no longer engaged in business.

At the junction with Park Road stood Number 62, Croxted Road where Wodehouse's parents lived for a few months in 1895. The house features under a variety of names in no less than five Wodehouse novels, including Sam the Sudden and Company for Henry. It was demolished in the 1960s, much to Wodehouse's dismay. He would have liked to horsewhip the developer on the steps of his club, if he had had one.

Further down Croxted Road there still stands a pair of semi-detached houses similar to the original Number 62. The pond from which the two swans Egbert and Percy observed the wayward antics of the characters in Big Money is also no longer to be seen.

We followed in the footsteps of Lord Biskerton, known as "the Biscuit" to his friends, on his first visit to Valley Fields in Chapter 5 of Big Money, along the route usually taken by Wodehouse himself on his frequent visits to his old school to watch the school rugger matches, as it enabled him to get his lunch before the game at the Alleyn’s Head. Before the Biscuit arrived at this most admirable pub with its superb beer he called in to collect the keys to Peacehaven from Mr Cornelius, the estate agent. The office is still an estate agent's although the name over the door is no longer Messrs Matters and Cornelius, it is Stapleton Long.

The Alleyn’s Head that Wodehouse knew was destroyed by the man who destroyed more London buildings than even the most industrious developer – Adolf Hitler. Unfortunately, its successor, although unlike the estate agent still trading at an appropriate address, was not open for business on this particular afternoon.

Opposite lay the entrance to Acacia Grove, or Mulberry Grove, as the Biscuit knew it. On the corner of Acacia Grove is the path to the station, the asphalt-paved, beehive-lined passage down which the Biscuit hurried his aunt, Lady Vera Mace, on her way back to the station, when, considering her brother had bungled it, she came down to visit her nephew herself, on the very evening when he was escorting Kitchie Valentine to the Bijou Palace cinema. The last thing the Biscuit wanted was his aunt dodging about the place "taking notes of his movements with bulging eyes".

A number of the houses on both sides of the Grove still have low stone walls on both sides of their front doors surmounted by lions, balls or greyhounds and, in the case of Number two, sphinxes, making it the best candidate for Peacehaven, which Plum described as a:

"two-story edifice in the Neo-Suburbo-Gothic style of architecture, constructed of bricks which appeared to be making a slow recovery from a recent attack of jaundice. Like so many of the houses in Valley Fields it showed what Montgomery Perkins, the local architect, could do when he put his mind to it."

The jaundice is plainly of the chronic variety as Wodehouse's description might equally well have been written yesterday.

Leaving the Biscuit and Big Money behind, we made our way under the railway to the black gate into the grounds of Dulwich College, now locked, but Elin Murphy was armed with the code to open it. Wodehouse went to the school in 1894, at the age of 13, and left in 1900, aged 18, to work in the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, after his father had told him that he could not afford to send him up to Oxford. Unlike many other writers, he thoroughly enjoyed his time at school, writing years later, to his ex-Dulwich schoolfriend, William Townend:

"To me the years between 1896 and 1900 seem like Heaven. Was the average man really unhappy at school? Or was Dulwich in our time an exceptionally good school?"