The Penguin Lessons by Tom Michell review – heartwarmingly eccentric

Tom Michell is a self-described callow youth when he arrives in Argentina in the 1970s to teach in a boys’ boarding school, “a country boy from the gentle Downs of rural Sussex” who is unprepared for life under Isabel Perón’s government, and the threat of a military coup. But The Penguin Lessons isn’t a history book, or a travelogue, either, although it does touch on politics and on Michell’s explorations: it’s the story of how, on one of his journeys, he found an oil-drenched penguin on the beach in Punta del Este in Uruguay, and smuggled it back to his school.

Michell sees just one penguin alive amid a scene of devastation, hundreds of birds lying dead in the sand “from the high water mark to the sea and stretching far away along the shore to the north”. He decides he has to save this one bird, and manages to transport it back to the flat where he’s staying. “I couldn’t dream up a more unsuitable place for cleaning a tar-sodden penguin,” he writes, before carefully immobilising it and setting to work with various products, “ butter and margarine, olive oil and cooking oil, soap, shampoo and detergent”.

Once clean, the penguin won’t stop following him when he tries to return it to the sea, and he resolves, with the insouciance of a man in his 20s, to take it with him over the border and back to his Argentinian school.

There, the penguin, now named Juan Salvador - after the Spanish version of Jonathan Livingston Seagull - wins the heart of everyone it meets, watching rugby matches from the sideline, swimming in the school pool, doted on by pupils and teachers alike.

“Perhaps an English boarding school (or one in South America) mirrors life in a penguin rookery more than most other forms of human society,” Michell writes, pondering on how it was that “a penguin brought such comfort and tranquillity to the people whose lives he touched”.

Charmingly illustrated with sketches of the Magellan penguin, Michell’s memoir is affectionate, although never sentimental. It’s also funny, particularly as he recounts his journey back to Argentina. There’s the penguin guano stinking out the bus, which he attempts to pretend has nothing to do with him, and then trying to get through customs with a story (intended to appeal to Argentine nationalism) about his repatriation of an Argentine penguin. Michell hopes Juan Salvador will go unnoticed, but the bird lets out an almighty squawk, and the customs officer isn’t about to listen to “the finer points of habeas corpus for penguins”.

The humour doesn’t always quite pay off, and the author has a bit of a tendency to overegg a narrative that really doesn’t need it. “Goodbye, little bird ... Henceforth, may your path be untrammelled and untroubled.” But it’s clear that this is a much-beloved tale about a much-beloved bird - Michell admits that Juan Salvador has been the subject of “countless Michell family bedtime stories” - and it is, for the most part, heartwarmingly eccentric. Given the popularity of Monty the penguin and the ever-present appetite of British readers for animal books, it’s bound to be a hit.

The Penguin Lessons is published by Penguin (£7.99). Click here to buy it for £5.99