Meredith and Co.

This entertaining novel (published in 1933) about life in a preparatory school in the south of England draws heavily on the experiences of the author, George Mills (born 1 October 1896), as a young master from 1925 to 1926 at Windlesham House School in Sussex.

It would, however, be possible to construe that he was imagining the school in an immediate pre-war context with some of the boys destined for active service towards the end of the war.
“The mind of the small boy attaches tremendous importance to trivial matters. When the whole of Europe is swaying on the brink of a precipice, anxious citizens are snatching extra editions of the papers, and harassed parents are wondering how they can afford to educate and clothe their children, the small boy is knitting his brows and puzzling over a paper aeroplane!”


Whereas Mills might have been looking back at the financial disaster of the late 1920s, he might also have had in mind his own prep school days at Parkfield School (also in Sussex) and the impact the war had on his schoolmates. He hints at this remembrance at the end of the book in relating what happened to the schoolboy Meredith after he left prep school. Though describing an interwar context for his career, surely the loss of life points to Mills’s memories of lost lives during the war:
“Meredith was not thinking of the future. He did not know it but he was standing on the threshold of true greatness and was destined, after a fine Public School career, to pass some years of self-sacrifice and devotion to duty in the African swamps where, as a young doctor, he was to lay down his life fighting a cholera plague.”
The choice of the words ‘self-sacrifice’, ‘lay down his life’ and ‘fighting’ strongly suggests that he was reflecting on the war dead. Mills had served from June 1916 as a Private in the Rifle Brigade and later transferred to the Royal Army Service Corps in 1917. (His military service record is available at Ancestry.com but does not reveal much about his service.)