Wild at heart – An Irishman’s Diary on the centenary of the death of Saki

Hector Hugh Munro, who wrote under the pseudonym Saki, and who was killed in action 100 years ago on November 14th, was a master of the short-story form. As Augustine Martin pointed out almost 50 years ago in his wonderful Exploring English I anthology, Saki’s most memorable stories involve children “and their constant battle for happiness in a world of menacing adults”.

Saki certainly had a great insight into the minds of children but, far from being weak or helpless or dependent, his child characters were resourceful, imaginative and, at times, could be brutally vindictive. There was usually a humorous element to their revenge, however, and the adults on the receiving end deserved their comeuppances.

Munro was born in 1870 in Akyab (now Sittwe) in Burma (now Myanmar), which was then part of the British Empire. His father was an inspector general in the Indian Imperial Police. When his mother died at the young age of 29, he and his siblings were sent to a village near Barnstaple in north Devon, where they were raised by their grandmother and aunts. It was a strict upbringing and the aunts provided models for characters in future stories such as The Lumber Room and Sredni Vashtar.

The Munro children led a fairly isolated life, having private tutors until attending school at the age of 12. HH was sent to Pencarwick School in Exmouth before boarding at Bedford Grammar School. He joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma (as George Orwell was to do some 30 years after him) but after two years he fell ill with malaria and returned to England, where he embarked on a career in journalism.

He wrote for a number of newspapers and magazines and in 1900 published The Rise of the Russian Empire under his own name. From 1902 to 1908, he was Morning Post foreign correspondent in the Balkans, Warsaw, Russia and Paris, after which he settled in London. With European great-power tensions mounting, “invasion literature” became popular (Erskine Childers’s Riddle of the Sands would be an example) and Saki took advantage to publish a novel, When William Came (1913), about a German invasion of England.

With the outbreak of war, he enlisted (although officially over age), refused a commission and became an ordinary soldier, knowing he was more likely to see battle that way. Sadly, a German sniper ended his life near Beaumont-Hamel in France during the Battle of the Ancre. He has no known grave and is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial.

A number of commentators have suggested he was homosexual but as that was illegal in the Britain of his time, it was a side of his life that would have had to be kept secret.

His pseudonym may have come from the cupbearer in the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (the Persian poem is referred to in a number of his short stories) or it may refer to a type of South American monkey (mentioned in one short story). He created a number of mischievous adult characters, such as Lady Carlotta in The Schartz-Metterklume Method (mistaken for a governess by an overbearing woman, she puts the so-called method of teaching history into effect with her new charges to hilarious effect).

But his most memorable characters are his children, particularly Nicholas in his most famous story, The Lumber Room. Nicholas is not allowed go on a hastily improvised seaside trip by his strict aunt because he’d put a frog in his morning bread and milk. He’s also forbidden to enter the gooseberry garden that day but while his aunt is out patrolling the garden to make sure her order is obeyed, Nicholas gains access to the key to the always-locked lumber room and explores its treasures.

Meanwhile, the aunt becomes convinced he’s hiding in the garden somewhere and slips into an empty rainwater tank while looking for him. When she calls on him to help her out, he says he’s forbidden to enter the garden and anyway he doesn’t think her voice is his aunt’s but that of the “Evil One” tempting him. When he asks would there be strawberry jam for tea and is told there would, he pretends that clinches it for him because he says his aunt had told him there was none in the house (although he knew there were four jars).

He walks off and leaves the unfortunate aunt trapped for 35 minutes until a kitchenmaid rescues her. “Tea that evening was partaken of in a fearsome silence” but the unperturbed Nicholas thought happily about the lumber-room treasures.