Goodbye, Mr. Chips

Returning to teaching, Chips keeps his room at Mrs. Wickett’s across the street and maintains a light workload. Nevertheless, for the first time in his life, he feels absolutely “necessary;” his new indispensability to Brookfield is, to him, the most sublime feeling life can offer. He finds that he can repeat his old jokes and Latin puns to a ready new audience, and his new, sometimes irreverent witticisms about such things as the cafeteria food only add luster to his legend. With Chatteris’s illness and death in 1917, Chips serves for the first time, and for the rest of the war, as Acting Head, a role he performs diligently though he feels he is not quite equal to the task at his age.

On Sundays, it now falls to Chips to read aloud the names of Brookfeldians slain, a task which sometimes brings him to tears. One week, he includes a tribute to his old friend Herr Staefel, Brookfield’s former German master, who has just been killed at the Western Front. Many are shocked that Chips would mourn an “enemy” alongside the school’s patriotic dead but grant him the latitude due to his age and eccentricity.