Chalky

by Matthew Vaughan

Chalky is born into the heyday of Victoria's England, but he starts life at the lower end of the Imperial spectrum. Son of a prostitute and of an unknown father, he is rescued from the horrendous slums of nineteenth-century Derby by Giles Burnyeat, a clergyman of tender if not entirely unclouded conscience. Chalky spends his childhood in an appalling orphanage, only to be rescued again by Giles. Chalky takes the Queen's shilling and is promoted to become the youngest sergeant in the Regiment. When his benefactor and mentor dies, leaving him a modest legacy, Chalky makes his way into Sandhurst and takes a commission.

With his foot now firmly on the ladder to success, Chalky becomes immersed in dashing enterprise in the further reaches of Empire. Having made good his escape from the jungle of Victorian Derby, he goes on to achieve heroism in the more exotic but no less dangerous jungle of West Africa, carving out his own destiny in the flood tide of an Army and an Empire at their peak.

This is a stirring story of adventure, but it is at the same time a subtly fluent novel of ideas. Chalky escapes from the world of Mayhew to triumph in the lands of Kipling, but Matthew Vaughan's sympathy for the period and for the code by which Chalky lives make this a deeply absorbing study of a society at the vertiginous apex of change.

248 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1975