Goodbye, Mr. Chips

Chips’s marriage to Katherine is a great success, and in old age, he still has trouble believing that such happiness could really have been his. She quickly “conquers” Brookfield, where everyone takes to her, even the wives of the other masters, who may be jealous of her. She also has a transformative effect on Chips, who has always been a competent but uninspired teacher: well-liked and respected but never one to inspire love or veneration. Before meeting Katherine, he had already started to succumb, like many a longtime teacher, to the “dry rot” of his profession, simply going through the motions, year after year. Unexpectedly to all, including himself, Chips becomes a “new man,” finding within himself an unsuspected passion and warmth. His mind begins to move “more adventurously,” and his sense of humor blossoms into the inimitable wit that will soon make him legendary at Brookfield. His jokes and mnemonic puns delight his students as does the happiness he radiates, and Chips finally realizes his age-old dream of being “loved” at Brookfield as well as honored and obeyed.

Katherine’s progressive politics and sympathies also temper his longtime conservatism, softening (if not reversing) many of his stances. Gifted with a “cleverer brain” than his, Katherine easily holds her own in their debates and often coaxes him into relaxing some of his old-line rigor. Her more capacious view of the world and England even broadens his sense of patriotism and country, which his long isolation at Brookfield had narrowed. After much arguing, she convinces both Chips and the other authorities to allow underprivileged boys from a South London mission supported by Brookfield to play the school’s team in soccer. Going against centuries of tradition and snobbery, she organizes the match and the high tea that follows, and the East End boys—who are far from the “hooligans” the school authorities had feared—take to her as keenly as the Brookfield boys. Years later, during the War, one of these mission boys, now a soldier, calls on Chips and shares his glowing memories of that day and especially of Katherine. Gratified, Chips tells him that very few people he knows have any memory of his wife, who died in 1898, less than a year after that soccer match. Shocked, the soldier gives his heartfelt condolences. A month or so later, Chips learns that the soldier has been killed at Passchendaele.

In his room at Mrs. Wickett’s, the school bells evoke the best times of Chips’s life, mostly of the multi-talented Katherine’s sweetness, humor, and sagacity. Her advice, often for mercy to a student who had misbehaved, won him over nine times out of 10, and in half of those times in which he had stood firm, he later wished he had listened to her. Years later, when dealing with young offenders, he would often feel the “softening wave” of her memory and show the boys leniency. The attitudes of some students, however, rubbed Katherine the wrong way, such as the “cocksure” ones, for whom she urged more, not less, severity.

As he looks back, Chips cherishes his rich storehouse of memories, especially of Brookfield, feeling himself to be their last defender against the oblivion of time. Few, if any, share many of his pellucid memories of the school. He knows that with his death, his memories will be lost forever, like much of Brookfield’s older lore, such as why the old fifth-form room is called “the Pit.” Chips consoles himself with the thought of someday writing a memoir but can never quite rouse the energy and concentration. Hardest of all, he thinks, would be making these amusing but small-scale events (such as one involving a sack of potatoes) come alive for those who were not there.

One of Chips’s strongest memories is the “horrifying nightmare” of the day in 1898 when his wife died in childbirth, along with their child. Somehow, he forces himself to go about his duties as usual following Katherine’s death; this is his way of “getting used” to the terrible turn of events. Answering the trivial questions of his students, who do not yet know about his personal tragedy, he must bottle up his grief and rage. At his desk in fourth form, in a “trance,” he opens a stack of mail, hardly registering that the sheets of paper within are all blank. Only later does he remember the date of that terrible day: April 1, or April Fool’s Day.

After Katherine’s death, Chips moves out of School House and back into his Brookfield bachelor quarters but keeps on as housemaster, which provides him with a distraction from his grief and loneliness. At 50, he seems suddenly old to his colleagues and students, though he still feels quite active, even athletic. As the new century dawns, he softens into a new identity as a lovable, venerable eccentric, with a host of affable mannerisms and a memorably threadbare wardrobe. He feels liberated by this new freedom to be himself and takes pleasure in the boys’ mimicry of his habits, such as the punctilious way he takes “call-over” (roll call). In his eighties, he still remembers the names from many of these call-overs in their exact sequences (or “choruses”) and sometimes ponders the vagaries of fate that brought these boys together under his wing and then scattered them. He thinks also of the lingering influence of Katherine, whose brief but brilliant appearance in his life broadened many of his views. Largely thanks to her, he has never been jingoistic in such matters as the Boer War and has fond memories of lightly ribbing the prime minister, Lloyd George, which shocked some of the onlookers but charmed George himself. As people said later, Chips “gets away with it […] I suppose at that age anything you say to anybody is all right…” (35).