The Terror of St Trinian's and Other Drawings - By Ronald Searle Page 0,2

fascinated, then obsessed, with what it was possible to do with pen and pencil. No one paid much attention to this, nor to the fact that the drawings were immediately grotesque. This was assumed to be one of the penalties for being ‘cackhanded’, local dialect for mocking a left-hander, which is what I am. It was my good fortune that I got off to such a suitable geographical start. I had the inborn advantage of the eccentric, the abnormal seeming to me, as well as to most of those around me, perfectly normal and not at all a caricature of ‘proper’ behaviour as demanded by ‘them’ from outside. In addition, nobody suggested that there was anything ludicrous in the fact that, for the first time since the Searles had plodded their way through the bogs to escape the Vikings, a left-handed Searle was proclaiming that he had to be An Artist, instead of a gravedigger, or whatever.

(Like a surprising number of artists, he is a good writer.)

He started, like most cartoonists, as an artist, that is, trained (in his case by the Cambridge School of Art) to draw things as they were. 2 His early cartoons are not yet Searlesque, if that is the word. At some point the artist gives way to the caricaturist, who draws things as they are superficially not. His development as an artist has to take into account his wartime record, from his volunteering for the army in April 1939 until his liberation from the squalor of Changi Gaol in 1945. He had been a prisoner of war since 1942, in among the most wretched and soul-destroying of situations a soldier could experience. More often than not it was the body that was destroyed, rather than just the soul. It is probably tasteless to speculate that it was during his imprisonment by the Japanese that his vision was served by watching the bodies of his fellow soldiers become emaciated caricatures of their former selves; at great personal risk to himself, he created a visual record, hundreds of sketches drawn in secrecy and concealed beneath the bodies of cholera victims, which his Japanese captors were disinclined to handle. Of himself, in October 1943, after the completion of the Siam–Burma railway, he wrote:

I weighed about seven of my former eleven stone, my leaf-bound legs were puffed up with beri-beri, large areas of my body were decorated with a suppurating crust from some exotic skin disease and one of my ankles was eaten to the bone by a large tropical ulcer. Apart from this, my three-weekly bouts of malaria had left what was still visible of my skin between scabies and ringworm, a pleasing bright yellow. However medically picturesque I may have been, behind the mess I was still alive and just about kicking.

Changi Gaol, where he was finally to be imprisoned, had been, he noted sardonically, built by the British.

It epitomized – and probably still does – all that is administratively desirable for degrading and psychologically diminishing the guilty, in the firm belief that confinement for a number of years in small locked boxes can be spiritually rehabilitating and physically cleansing both for them and for society.

It had been designed for six hundred criminals; by the time Searle arrived, it contained ten thousand. Not only hungry but desperate for something to smoke, he would use spare corners of his drawings, ‘half of Pickwick Papers after a fifth reading, and the whole of Rose Macaulay’s Minor Pleasures of Life’. He met Macaulay many years later by chance.

I told her I had been able to add a further minor pleasure to her anthology. Sad to say she was not amused, looked me up and down with distaste and turned her back to talk to someone more respectful. Dickens, I feel, would have been more understanding.

Once the war was over, he drew on his experience of captivity only tangentially. In his 1990 biography of Searle, Russell Davies points out the obvious similarity between the ‘bloody sportsdays’ illustration for Lilliput of 1952 (St Trinian’s girls chained to a heavy roller, being whipped by a sadistic schoolmistress) and ‘“Light Duties” for sick men’, a drawing made in 1944 of prisoners pulling a heavy roller while being overseen by a Japanese guard. ‘This is one of the few instances in which the Changi experience can be seen to have a directly circumstantial bearing on Searle’s black humour,’ says Davies, who also points out that the whip-wielding mistress is an aberration in the logic