The Decline and Fall of Frankie Buller Summary

The narrator is sitting in his study, gazing at his vast collection of books and thinking how he can never "unforget" any of them, that they have become a part of his psyche. However, he visits a friend's house and hears the cry of a cuckoo, and this sound allows him to return in his mind to a time before all the books, a time in the narrator's youth when he was part of "the kingdom of Frankie Buller."

The narrator (Alan, ten years of age in the memory) is a member of a dozen-strong boys' "army" headed by twenty-something Frankie Buller. Frankie is enamored of war and military strategy. He has a father who was wounded in the first World War, whose monthly government allowance allows Frankie to play at...