PG Wodehouse was not one of the hard-faced men who did well out of the war. The men that Evelyn Waugh’s Basil Seal wanted to emulate in Put Out More Flags.
Wodehouse had a bad time of it in the war made worse in 1944 when his step-daughter, Leonora, died after a routine operation. A crushing blow for him and Ethel. Four years later Spring Fever was published. It has a plot of great complexity with an earl that looks like a butler (Lord Shortlands) and a butler that looks like an earl (Spink); an idea adopted for Dad’s Army with Captain Mainwaring and Sergeant Wilson. There is a colourful valet, Augustus Robb, who bears a resemblance to Simon Templar’s Hoppy Uniatz. It’s a perfectly constructed Wodehouse comedy/farce.
However, embedded are two things that make the comedy bitter-sweet. It is set in the fictional Beevor Castle in Kent, identified by Norman Murphy as the real Hever Castle. Hever is not far from where Leonora Cazalet had lived. There is a close bond between Lord Shortlands and his youngest daughter, Lady Teresa; he calls her Terry and she calls him Shorty. It is most improbable that a daughter would call her father by a nick-name like that but I think it is Wodehouse’s homage to Leonora. He called her Snorky, she called him Plummy. In the novel it most unusually rings a false note but Wodehouse can be forgiven for recreating the close relationship he had with his step daughter and weaving it into the Spring Fever plot. Incidentally, the characters in Spring Fever never appear again in subsequent novels, giving credence that it was Wodehouse’s tribute to Leonora and their friendship. He must have felt very sad writing his valediction.
