"What are the chances of a cobra biting Harold, Jeeves?"
"Slight, I should imagine, sir. And in such an event, knowing the boy as intimately as I do, my anxiety would be entirely for the snake."
Children - or should we say "fiends in human shape" - tend to get a raw deal in the hilarious tales of P. G. "Plum" Wodehouse, coming out with things like "Daddee, are daisies little bits of the stars that have been chipped off by the angels?" or even "You've got a face like a fish!" When not turning the brains of normally sane, rational adults into soppy, sentimental lumps of blancmange, they are actually noisy, messy, cunning, and even venomous.
The ninth of Paul Kent's occasional essays on matters Wodehousean is a fascinating tour through Plum's alternative brand of tongue-in-cheek pedagogy, and a timely reminder that lurking somewhere in our adult selves is the child we all once were.

Paul Kent is the Vice-Chairman of the P G Wodehouse Society (UK), and has been a fan of the great man for longer than he cares to remember. Between 2019 and 2022, he published a trilogy of books that offers a comprehensive tour of Wodehouse's creative imagination - 'This is jolly old Fame', 'Mid-Season Form' and 'The Happiness of the World' - which seeks to prove that Plum was not just a great comic writer, but a great writer, period. Books 4 and 5 of the trilogy - respectively 'Plum's Literary Heroes' and 'Plum at the Theatre' - are currently in preparation; and the first ten occasional essays entitled What Ho! are available now: they are Wodehouse on Food, Sport, Love, Money, Class, Cats, Dogs, Hollywood, Fashion, Childhood, and Faith.