“What I want,” I said, “is petrol.”
“What you’ll get,” said the bloke, “is a thick ear.”
It’s not often that I rate a P.G. Wodehouse book 4 stars and not 5, but I felt that some of these stories were lacking some of the classic Wodehouse humour. Of course, some of them weren’t, and I found myself following unimpressed family members around and rattling off quotes to them. What certainly hasn’t been lost in the short stories that comprise Very Good, Jeeves is the way in which Wodehouse subtly takes the mickey out of the aristocrats of 1930s London. Wooster, the young man who always relies on his resourceful butler Jeeves to get him out of various scrapes, is of the higher class, and often talks in detail about how upset he was when he realised he wouldn’t have time to change into the appropriate attire for the fish course.
A costermonger, roused, is a terrible thing. I had never seen the proletariat really stirred before, and I’m bound to say it rather awed me. I mean, it gave you some idea of what it must have been like during the French Revolution. […] And then they passed beyond mere words and began to introduce the vegetable motive.
One of my favourite stories in Very Good, Jeeves was about a woman called Laura Pyke who came to stay with some friends of Wooster’s, the Littles (Wooster was also a guest at the Littles’ house). Pyke would sit through every meal served telling everyone how bad it was for your stomach lining to eat certain things, rendering everyone very not-hungry-anymore. Mrs Little, however, was in awe of Pyke and took everything she said as gospel, which leads to some rather hilarious quotes on Wodehouse’s part about the impressionability of women. After a careful scheme concocted by Jeeves, Mrs Little soon realised that:
Laura Pyke is entirely unfit for human consumption and must be cast into outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.
And so concluded the story.