In the 1980s, I attended a preparatory school in Surrey. We learned Ancient Greek and played rugby bare kneed in the snow. We also had story time, when old Mr Lovelock would read to us. Understanding his audience, he gave us M. R. James ghost stories and Grendel slaughtering men in the mead hall. But the story that made the greatest impression on me was by the humourist Hector Hugh Munro, better known as Saki. (Like Kipling, Munro was born in the Raj – Burma rather than Bombay. He enlisted as a private in 1914 and was killed at Beaumont Hamel two years later.) Saki’s stories take place in, and satirise, Edwardian high society. He reads like an arch and acid uncle to P.G. Wodehouse. ‘Sredni Vashtar’ is perhaps atypical in that it doesn’t feature a wit lampooning the country house set. It has, instead, Conradin, a sickly boy living with an overbearing cousin, Mrs De Ropp, who seems intent on draining her charge’s life of hope and joy. Like a later master of the macabre short, Roald Dahl, Saki understands the fantasies of oppressed children. Sredni Vashtar is the name Conradin gives to a polecat-ferret that he keeps and secretly worships in the garden shed, alongside a beloved pet hen. When Mrs De Ropp discovers the pet hen and sells it, Conradin asks his captive deity for a favour: “Do one thing for me, Sredni Vashtar.” What follows is intensely dark, a victory of the imagination over sanctimonious oppression, with one of the most satisfying final paragraphs in fiction.
First published in May 1910 in The Westminster Gazette. Collected in The Chronicles of Clovis, John Lane, London, 1911 and widely thereafter
A Personal Anthology 