Short film
BIOGRAPHY
Saki was the pseudonym of Hector Hugh Munro. According to the legend, he named his alias after a word he found in the Rubáiyát, by Omar Khayyam, translated by Fitzgerald, “saqi”, meaning “cup bearer”, a servant in charge of liquors, and therefore of cheerfulness. Nevertheless, some people said it came after “sarcasm”, because of the tone of his journalistic articles.
He was born in 1870, in Burma, now Myanmar, then an Indian province, and thus a colony belonging to the British empire. His father was a police officer working there. Hector was the youngest of his three children.
When he was two, he lost his mother in a very tragic accident: in a visit to Great Britain, a cow knocked her down, and days later she died from her injures.
The father, being a widower now, decided to leave his children in Great Britain under the care of two aunts. According to Ethel, Hector’s sister, they weren’t very affectionate (to put it midly), and later Hector took his revenge using them as inspirations for some of his characters.
When he was twelve, he was sent to Bedford, a boarding school.
After finishing school, he decided to go to Burma with his father to work also as a policeman. But he contracted malaria there and, after a year, had to go back to England.
There, he decided to became a writer. His family supported him in this project, and after six years, in 1900, he produced a historical book about the Russian empire.
We don’t know much about his private life, and after what happened to Oscar Wilde, he carried an even more secluded life.
He had a stroke of luck when the editor of the magazine The Westminster Gazette commissioned him to write a series of short sketches about famous contemporary figures. It was then when he adopted his well-known pseudonym.
In 1902, he was sent as a reporter for The Morning Post in the Balkans, where he spent six years.
Back in London, he published a pair of novels, The Unbearable Bassington and When William Came, as well a kind of political fiction, A German Invasion Fantasy. However he showed his greatest talent in his short stories, first published in magazines and later collected in volumes such as Reginald, The Chronicles of Clovis, and Beasts and Super-Beasts.
He volunteered to serve at the First World War, even as he was forty-four and had previously malaria. They offered him a position in the rear, but he preferred to serve in the front as an ordinary trooper. He was killed by a German sniper in 1916 and his body was never recovered.
One of his most famous paradoxical remarks was “to have reached thirty is to have failed in life”.
Saki was the pseudonym of Hector Hugh Munro. According to the legend, he named his alias after a word he found in the Rubáiyát, by Omar Khayyam, translated by Fitzgerald, “saqi”, meaning “cup bearer”, a servant in charge of liquors, and therefore of cheerfulness. Nevertheless, some people said it came after “sarcasm”, because of the tone of his journalistic articles.
He was born in 1870, in Burma, now Myanmar, then an Indian province, and thus a colony belonging to the British empire. His father was a police officer working there. Hector was the youngest of his three children.
When he was two, he lost his mother in a very tragic accident: in a visit to Great Britain, a cow knocked her down, and days later she died from her injures.
The father, being a widower now, decided to leave his children in Great Britain under the care of two aunts. According to Ethel, Hector’s sister, they weren’t very affectionate (to put it midly), and later Hector took his revenge using them as inspirations for some of his characters.
When he was twelve, he was sent to Bedford, a boarding school.
After finishing school, he decided to go to Burma with his father to work also as a policeman. But he contracted malaria there and, after a year, had to go back to England.
There, he decided to became a writer. His family supported him in this project, and after six years, in 1900, he produced a historical book about the Russian empire.
We don’t know much about his private life, and after what happened to Oscar Wilde, he carried an even more secluded life.
He had a stroke of luck when the editor of the magazine The Westminster Gazette commissioned him to write a series of short sketches about famous contemporary figures. It was then when he adopted his well-known pseudonym.
In 1902, he was sent as a reporter for The Morning Post in the Balkans, where he spent six years.
Back in London, he published a pair of novels, The Unbearable Bassington and When William Came, as well a kind of political fiction, A German Invasion Fantasy. However he showed his greatest talent in his short stories, first published in magazines and later collected in volumes such as Reginald, The Chronicles of Clovis, and Beasts and Super-Beasts.
He volunteered to serve at the First World War, even as he was forty-four and had previously malaria. They offered him a position in the rear, but he preferred to serve in the front as an ordinary trooper. He was killed by a German sniper in 1916 and his body was never recovered.
One of his most famous paradoxical remarks was “to have reached thirty is to have failed in life”.
SUMMARY
Eleanor, Eric and Bertie’s mother, wants to accommodate their education to the pacifist ideas of the National Peace Council. Its proposal is to change the war toys children usually play with with “peace toys”. The Council believes that this way children will become less aggressive and less warlike.
In order to start her experiment, she asks her brother, who usually comes to see the family at Easter bringing some toys for his nephew (a twelve-year-old boy) and his niece (a nine-and-a-half-year-old girl), to bring this time “civilian” (that is, non-military) toys this time. He also would have to explain them how they work, since they would be new for the children and very different from the usual ones. From what we can see in the story, war toys don’t require any instructions.
So, uncle Harvey arrives with some figures representing important and valuable contributors to social progress, as politicians, philosophers, reformers, pedagogues..., and some curious objects as pocket dustbins or similar useful urban items. The children don’t show much enthusiasm, but listen to the uncle’s explanations. All in all, they don’t seem very convinced.
Then, uncle Harvey leaves the children alone with the toys for a while, expecting they will know how to play peaceful games; but when he comes back, he founds out that Eric and Bertie have a lot of imagination and that they are also able to turn the tables.
QUESTIONS
-What do you think are the best way in schools or at home to promote the ideal of peace between nations?
-Do toys have a real influence in children's education? Do governments have to issue rules about toys? What kind of rules?
-Is war a natual human instinct?
-Toys for boys and toys for girls... how can we avoid being sexists with toys?
-What do you know about these people: John Stuart Mill, Robert Raikes, Mrs Hemans, Rowland Hill, John Hershel, Hogarth, Madame Du Barry, Madame de Maintenon, Marshal Saxe...?
VOCABULARY
upbringing, Dreadnoughts, hot houses, wahs-house, ballot-box, sewers, calico
