School daze

This post is part of Playing By The Book's I'm Looking For A Book About... feature. Do please have a look at the other posts about going back to school, or starting school! If you're a teacher, a parent, or a student teacher, you'll be introduced to some fabulous books to inspire you.

Image: waterstones.com

Flora Fox is disgusted. Her parents are going to Italy for three months to help her grandmother, who has fallen and broken her leg, and after a disastrous summer holiday at Casa Boffi, have decided to send their daughter to a progressive boarding school instead of taking her with them. Furious, Flora is on the train when she falls asleep, and seems to hear voices chanting a strange rhyme. When she awakes, she is wearing an uncomfortable school clothes, including enormous knickers (of course Penrice Hall has no uniforms), and her mobile phone, iPod and laptop are all gone. She discovers that she has been switched with another girl called Flora, summoned by three St Winifred's schoolgirls from 1935: sweet but dim Dulcie, bright Pogo and charismatic but spoilt Pete. The girls have found a spell book in a mysterious closed room, and this is the first successful spell they've tried. Flora must survive mean girl Consuela Carver, fearsome Latin teacher Miss Harbottle and huge knickers, and work out how she can get back to the 21st century.

I really enjoyed this book. I've written before about why I love school stories, particularly the Chalet School, and Beswitched has all the best elements: the emphasis on character development, the opportunities for girls to be heroic, a rescue and resolution coming through conflict.  I particularly liked that Flora is not a particularly admirable protagonist to begin with, but the changes in her character don't come through punishment, as poor Eustacia from the Chalet School books, but recognising the unattractive aspects of her character in Consuela and Pete, and her influence on their characters has some unexpected outcomes. It is also a very funny book.

It would be a great book to read with children before they start a new school; Flora makes some mistakes in a strange new situation, but she survives and ultimately triumphs. Highly recommended to 8+, and to fans of time slip novels, particularly Penelope Farmer's Charlotte Sometimes. One word of warning- there are some minor swears (bloody, damn and bollocks) which are totally in keeping with Flora's character and development, but you may want to make this a discussion point about the time and place for such language with children if you're reading it with them, or decide on the appropriate age for this book accordingly.

The New Mistress At The Chalet School by Elinor M Brent-Dyer

Please visit The Girls' Own Blog Carnival

This is part of the Girls' Own blog carnival. Please do check out Did You Ever Stop To Think and Forget To Start Again to see what other bloggers have written about!

I adore the Chalet School series for many reasons. It is a long running series- the first book, The School At The Chalet, was published in 1925; the final one, Prefects Of The Chalet School, in 1970. The New Mistress At The Chalet School is a later book, published in 1957, when the school is based in Switzerland post- World War II.

One of the features I have always enjoyed about the books is that while there is always a protagonist (Joey Bettany in the earlier books, a variety of characters including Daisy Venables and Bride Bettany in novels set in Guernsey and Wales during and immediately post World War Two and Mary-Lou Trelawney in many of the Switzerland ones) there are often multiple points of view. In New House at the Chalet School (1935) this included an unsympathetic new Matron. However New Mistress is in my experience unique, as the protagonist is a teacher, although there are multiple points of view.

Kathie Ferrars has just completed her degree, and her post at the Chalet School is her first teaching job. Her own school was a day school rather than a boarding school, so she is unprepared for the different staff- pupil relationship of boarding school life. She seems a little young for her age, still very reliant on the approval of her uncle and aunt who brought her up; in the first chapter she kneels on the carpet with her head in her aunt's lap (frequently an attitude of repentance of the school girls in Chalet School novels), and her aunt advises her that she needs to maintain her dignity with the girls. We are told at the end of chapter 1 that this advice is a source of some trouble for Kathie in the future (Brent-Dyer does like a foreshadowing authorial voice!)

The journey to the Chalet School (involving trans- European train travel) is mostly explained through food- American chocolates, French patisserie, breakfast in Basle including Swiss jam- must have been extremely exciting for readers, as rationing had finished only in the early 50s- my mother read these books well into her teens, and I'm sure this was the case with other readers. Memories of the shortages of cream, sweets, cakes and jam would have been still vivid.

Kathie makes friends among the other teachers, and takes advice on her new class- Inter V, girls who are either too young to be seniors (such as the incredibly fertile Joey's triplet daughers, Len, Con and Margot) or whose academic work is not up to the standard of the girls of their age, such as new girl Yseult Pertwee. All the features of the Chalet School education- tri-lingual in English, French and German, European in outlook, care of the girls' health and physical needs by abandoning the timetable and getting out into the fresh air for climbing, walking and skiing in the right weather- is established through explanation of the routines to Kathie, which felt natural- also making this book a good one to start with if you're not familiar with the series.

Conflict comes very quickly with Mary-Lou Trelawney, a prefect in this book. Mary-Lou is an interesting character. After her arrival in Three Go To The Chalet School when she is 10 Brent-Dyer is clearly enamoured with her informal way of addressing people (we are often assured that it is not "cheek") and her easy- going character, but I find her bumptious and irritating, and find it hard to believe that she would be so un-self aware at 17 or 18, particularly in a school where character is so important. Kathie finds her so to begin with, although after Mary-Lou has saved her from certain death in a crevasse of a glacier, she starts to think differently (as you would!)

Kathie makes other mistakes with discipline, but starts to loosen up after her accident, using her judgement to re-think her punishment of Margot for lighting a sparkler in prep that would have resulted in her missing part of her birthday treat. However she continues to misjudge situations, resulting in new girl Yseult breaking her collar bone in a skiing accident after she tries to take out Mary-Lou, whose  part in the Christmas play she is understudying. While the Chalet School is very forward thinking in many ways, in particular in the thematic approach to the curriculum, with an emphasis on thinking and understanding rather than learning facts by rote, the class conscious comments (for example about Joan Baker's permed hair) and disapproval of any parenting views out of the middle class norm (such as Mrs Pertwee's) are still in evidence (I wrote about this here).

This is a fascinating book. Not one of the most exciting plot-wise, maybe, but the only one I can think of where a teacher's first steps into professional life is depicted in a story for young readers.

Two dancing schools

My parents bought me this beautiful edition of Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes for my birthday in September:

Image: Waterstones.com

This is the 75th anniversary edition, with cover and slip cover designed by Cath Kidston. Some of the original illustrations, by Ruth Gervais, are reproduced on full pages, bordered and backed by Kidston's designs. It is a beautiful edition of the classic book, and I would say a great present for a Cath Kidston fan, a lover of children's fiction or a very careful 8-12 year old reader!

Re-reading the familiar story of the three Fossil sisters, adopted by Great Uncle Matthew (GUM)  and his niece, Sylvia (who the girls call Garnie), I was struck by the school-story aspect of it. Whilst Pauline, Petrova and Posy have lessons at home from their lodgers, Dr Jakes and Dr Smith, they also attend the Children's Academy of Dancing and Stage Training. Ballet Shoes was published in 1936, in an era when Elinor M Brent-Dyer's The Chalet School, Elsie J. Oxenham's The Abbey Girls and Dorita Fairlie Bruce's Dimsie series were at the height of their popularity, and the themes of fitting in, finding one's place in society and honour that are common in school stories can also be found in Ballet Shoes.

Image: nosycrow.com

I was very excited to learn that theatre critic Lyn Gardner had written a children's book, the first of a series. Published by the wonderful Nosy Crow, it is the story of Olivia and her little sister Eel, who are the daughters of an actress and a circus high wire walker. Following their mother's death, their father leaves them with their grandmother, who runs a stage school. This is a school in the full sense of the word- the pupils study the usual school curriculum as well as acting, dancing and singing.

Eel and Olivia make a dramatic entrance, as Eel ruins spoilt Katie Wilkes- Cox's performance at a school show, and Katie becomes Olivia's enemy. And to add to Olivia's woes, her grandmother has refused to allow circus skills, where Olivia shines, in the school's curriculum. She struggles to find her place and fit in, until her surreptitious practicing of wire walking in school leads to her making friends, and regaining her honour when Katie makes false accusations against her. It's a fun read, and I can imagine 9+ readers enjoying it, and looking forward to reading the others in the series.

School story fans would do well to read Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again?, the blog of Chalet School fan, er... @chaletfan, and Practically Marzipan, the blog of @actuallyaisha, who is re-reading and writing about the amazing Marlowe books by Antonia Forest.

Guest post: Books and reading as a child – a personal memoir part 4

By Richard

Image: biblio.com

A child’s meeting with a children’s writer

I was good at English, and at the age of about 11 won a school prize for a short sci-fi story which was terrifyingly psychological (I’ll spare you the plot summary). The prize was a book voucher and it was presented to me by the children’s writer H. E. Todd, who was famous for the Bobby Brewster series, although to be perfectly honest I’d never read any of his books. He came mainly to give us a talk about writing, which was fun; I remember a short, round, wheezy man in his seventies wearing braces and NHS spectacles; his main message (or the one that I was left with, at any rate) was the magic of the number three in stories: “Think of the Three Little Pigs or Goldilocks and the Three Bears – two isn’t quite enough, you’ll leave your readers thinking ‘is that it?’ while four is too many, you’ll send them to sleep. But three is just right.” I still have a signed copy of Bobby Brewster’s Torch although I think I’ve still never read it. I’ll have to test it out on the boys.



Image: amazon.co.uk



Schoolboys in literature: Grimble (Clement Freud, ill. Quentin Blake), The Compleet Molesworth (Geoffrey Willans, ill. Ronald Searle), The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13¾ (Sue Townsend)

Another book I think I got from the school book club was Grimble and Grimble at Christmas by Clement Freud. At this time my peers were reading (if they were reading anything at all) The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, which I could never get into. Fantasy was not really my thing; I much preferred realism and humour, preferably at the same time. Grimble is a boy of “about ten” whose parents are so vague that they don’t even know the exact date of his birthday (they make up for it by presenting him with a cake at random intervals). They are absent for most of the story, having at the start taken off to Peru (what is it about Peru?) leaving Grimble alone to fend for himself. You could probably not even write a children’s book in which that happens these days for fear of catching hell from the Daily Mail crowd, but actually I’m sure that a lot of children, maybe even all of them, love the idea of having the house to themselves. (I myself was often technically home alone, even though mum and dad were only downstairs in the shop, which felt really just like another room of the house.) Grimble’s parents seem so ordinarily distant that when they’re not actually there it barely makes any difference to their son, who appears quite indifferent. In any case, they haven’t actually abandoned him, but have been sure to leave him with an oven full of sandwiches, a fridge full of flasks of tea and and a list of addresses of family friends he can visit. Each day he goes to a different house, although instead of finding someone at home, there’s simply a recipe and ingredients for a different dinner. Among the unlikely dishes he makes are a coconut tart, eggs in mayonnaise, and – the best one, in my opinion – biscuits in burnt chocolate sauce, which he cooks in a saucepan on a camping gas fire in a railway signalman’s hut.

Image: http://www.stcustards.free-online.co.uk/intro.htm

Another schoolboy character I loved as a schoolboy was Nigel Molesworth from The Compleet Molesworth by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle. (I know Willans was the writer and creator of the character, but it seems unthinkable not to co-credit the books to Searle whose magnificent spindly illustrations were perfect for the chaotic language and period detail.) Even though the Molesworth books were set in a public (or prep) school in the 1950s with jokes in Latin, and I was a comprehensive-educated eighties child with a decidedly flakey grasp of precisely what the Romans had done for us, the books were still hilarious and easy for me to identify with. I even found myself fantasising about being in Molesworth’s “skool” myself, wishing that my own school life was more like his, probably because it belonged to a bygone age, and a fee-paying boarding school was more like a “community” compared to the humdrum daily life of a modern comprehensive. I said earlier about Grimble that I much preferred my books to be realistic, but when The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole came along, even though I devoured the book I still preferred the “lost realism” of Nigel Molesworth’s 1950s school to Adrian’s educational experience, possibly because the latter was an experience I shared. As a character in a Woody Allen film put it, “Too much reality is not what the people want”, and in a weird way, the Molesworth books became my preferred fantasy fiction. The Adrian Mole books (I only include the “original” ones, i.e. The Secret Diary and The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole – I lost interest in the many sequels) were massively successful when they came out in the early eighties, although when I look at them now they feel more dated than the Molesworth ones. What I loved most about the Mole books was the diary narrative; often I struggled to work my way through long chapters (I still do), but with a series of short diary entries the pages just flew by. I started writing a diary myself at the time and remember one of the entries read “Am on page 86 of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole ALREADY!!!”

Image: amazon.co.uk

Adrian was a year or two older than me, so reading his diary was like having an older brother, which as an only child was a good thing. That said, with his various problems he wasn’t exactly a role model, although he was basically a good person and certainly lucky to get Pandora Braithwaite to be his girlfriend (or to get a girlfriend full stop, I think – something that Townsend has said is largely due to the fact that the books were written by a woman). I’ve forgotten almost the whole book now but the part I always remember involves Adrian joining (after finally deciding he can’t beat them) school bully Barry Kent’s gang. The gang hang around deserted shopping centres after dark and one of them smashes a bottle on the ground; later, after they’ve all split up for the night, Adrian goes back, picks up the pieces of glass and puts them in a bin because he hates the idea of a “little kid” falling over on it the next day. In another scene Adrian goes to Barry’s home where “once I got used to the funny smell in the house, I started to relax for the first time in weeks”. Adrian is a very human, humane, “normal” boy in a world of mostly (with some notable exceptions) selfish, objectionable people. In this I suppose there are superficial similarities with Harry Potter; I sometimes wonder how many millions less Sue Townsend made from Adrian Mole than J.K. Rowling did from Potter because the former was “just too real” (not to mention the lack of merchandising rights).

Unwizardly To School

As a girl growing up in the London commuter belt in the 1970s I think my love of school stories came from two sources. One was my weekly fix of Bunty, which I bought with my pocket money, and would often wander into the road because I couldn’t wait to start reading it on my way home.  My favourite story was The Four Marys, about four girls at St Elmo’s boarding school, who had various adventures- I seem to remember them catching burglars- and possibly there was a teacher who was a spy?

My mum was a Liverpool grammar school girl. The daughter of factory workers, who grew up in the 1940s, she loved the Chalet School books and Lorna Hill’s Sadler’s Wells books. These were books about the Sadler’s Wells ballet school, and tended to be about older girls that the general school stories.

I loved Mallory Towers and St Clare’s books by Enid Blyton, and the wonderful books about the Marlowes by Antonia Forrest. I don’t remember getting them from the library, so I am fairly sure that I collected school stories from jumble sales and church bring and buys. I carried on collecting and reading Dimsie, Angela Brazil, Abbey school and Chalet School books well into my University years.

What was the attraction of books about boarding school stories from the 1930s- 1960s to a girl going to state schools in the 1970s? Well, for me they had strong girl characters (as I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, I was not keen on books with no girls, or weak girls). The girls were away from their parents, overcame difficulties such as being wrongly accused of cheating or stealing, making and losing friends, and in the case at least of the Chalet School, getting lost on mountains, falling through ice when skating on a lake or being involved in a train accident. The girls almost always navigated their own difficulties, often rescuing their friends from greater or smaller problems, since they were away from parents. However, this is not a Lord of the Flies world- there is a structure provided by rules, timetable, regular meals and a school staff to provide protection and enforcement.

Like the fantasy genre, most successful novelists created a whole world, usually sustained through a series of novels. The exception was Angela Brazil; and this may be why she is less well known today.  I think the benefit of a school setting is obvious for writers of fantasy novels for children and young adults. The familiarity of the school structure grounds the authors, making their fantasy worlds more believable, and the removal of the protagonists from the care of their families allows them to be put into dangerous situations in a credible way. After all, children at school encounter challenges and dangers that adults cannot experience.

The Worst Witch by Jill Murphy was first published in 1974, and is aimed at younger readers than most of the books in this blog. Mildred Hubble and her friend Maud are new pupils at Miss Cackle’s Academy for Young Witches. Mildred is a well meaning young witch, but she is clumsy and careless, and manages to, amongst other things, turn a stuck up classmate into a pig, ruin a broomstick riding display and, by making a mistake in her potion test, turn Maud and herself invisible. However, she saves the day by accidentally stopping rival witches from taking over the Academy.

Witch Week (1982) by the wonderful Diana Wynne Jones is one of the Chrestomanci series of novels. These are set in a number of parallel worlds connected to ours, where in general the landscape, natural world and society resemble Britain, but magic exists and is more or less accepted. Chrestomanci is responsible for regulating the use of magic in these parallel worlds. Witch Week is set in world Twelve C, where magic is present but illegal, and punishable by death by burning (the setting is contemporary).  Larwood House is a boarding school, but not a well funded one, for the children of executed witches. The Geography teacher, Mr Crossley, finds a note claiming that someone in class 2Y is a witch, meaning that the inquisition must be called in. Unfortunately the most unpopular members of the class, Charles Morgan and Nan Pilgrim, have just discovered that they are witches.

Wynne Jones is a fabulous writer (and sister of Isobel Armstrong, poet and Emeritus Professor of Victorian Studies at Birkbeck, University of London), and I think unfairly overshadowed by some later and inferior writers. One of the subtleties of this novel is that Charles and Nan, although victims of teasing and bullying, are in fact not particularly likeable characters at the beginning of the book. Charles is antagonistic and a know it all; Nan can’t stop talking and is tactless. Wynne Jones develops their characters in a way that does not eliminate their negative traits, but demonstrates how in some circumstances these can be positives, and the school setting is integral to this process. The children must learn how to tolerate each other, and eventually identify the positive aspects of their classmates’ characters in order to survive. While the Chrestomanci series nominally has a reading order, starting with The Lives of Christopher Chant, I would suggest starting with Charmed Life, as it has more of Chrestomanci in it and demonstrates how he controls the use of magic. Sadly, Diana Wynne Jones is very ill, and it is to be hoped that she recovers soon.

Before Anthony Horowitz’s Stormbreaker, featuring teenage spy Alex Rider, was published, he was a struggling children’s author and was considering giving up and focusing on his writing for television (he wrote Foyle’s War.) But he wrote Groosham Grange (1988) intending it to be a series- there are only two novels so far, and the rather (in my opinion) mean spirited comments on his website may suggest why he never went further than Return to Groosham Grange (first published as The Unholy Grail in 1999).

Horowitz has stated that Groosham Grange was influenced by his unhappy experiences at boarding school. David Eliot, the seventh child of a seventh child, is a great disappointment to his father, a merchant banker, who makes various very funny “when I was your age...” speeches. At the beginning of the book David has just been expelled from Beton College, where the boys must wear top hat and tails, say Good Morning in Latin and clean the older boys’ shoes.  His parents are (in a slapstick way) violent and cruel people, and when a prospectus for Groosham Grange school mysteriously arrives they send him there without any further investigation, mainly because it promises discipline and only one days’ holiday a year. The prospectus boasts that it’s the only school with its own cemetery!

The school is off the coast of Norfolk, and on the train journey from Liverpool Street, David meets Jeffrey Jones, who has been bullied because of his weight, glasses and stammer, and Jill Green, who ran away from her Swiss finishing school because she was so unsuccessful with the ladylike tasks she was given. The curate they meet en route faints when he hears that they’re going to Groosham Grange, and at Hunstanton they’re met from the train by a hunchback called Gregor, then rowed to Skrull Island by a pirate, Captain Bloodbath.

The rest of the children at the school seem mysteriously well behaved. The deputy head has no reflection, the French teacher M. LeLoup vanishes every full moon, the English teacher teaches Shakespeare as if she knows him personally, and the Science teacher and Matron has a very jealous pet crow. Jill and David can’t wait to get away, particularly after the Department of Education visitor dies in mysterious circumstances. Jeffrey, however, is very happy at the school, and is soon wearing the school ring that all children and staff are wearing...

As I have said, Horowitz’s website seems to be hinting at the similarities between Groosham Grange and the Harry Potter series. However, this first novel is not the story of a rejected child happily finding immediate acceptance in a magical world that is mostly wonderful and joyous, with warm, cosy dormitories, delicious food and fun learning. Groosham Grange is a dangerous, hostile place in this novel, and David eventually must make a choice to stay that is really no choice at all. It reads very much as the set up for a series, and I have the second novel to read as I’m intrigued to find out whether he grows to enjoy school.

Harry Potter of course is the best known of the fantasy school story genre. First published in 1997, it has become a global phenomenon, initially by word of mouth. It is one of the very few cases in children’s literature where the author is as famous and internationally recognised as their literary creation- Roald Dahl, maybe, is the only other one.  Her life, like that of the Brontes or Dickens, has become as mythologised as that of her creation- for example the stories of how the book was written in a cafe in Edinburgh while her baby daughter slept in her pushchair, which Rowling has largely discredited. There is no need to summarise the plot, as I am certain that my readers will be familiar with it, but I would like to state why I believe the novels are so successful.

Firstly, I think that Rowling creates a very believable alterative world. The magical world has a centre of commerce (Diagon Alley and Gringott’s bank), an administrative centre (Ministry of Magic) a sport (quidditch) and a specialist vocabulary (muggles, auror, animagus, Golden Snitch), as well as an education system (OWLs and NEWTs). These elements lend credibility to Harry’s adventures.

Secondly, the novels grow (in complexity, in the challenging nature of the themes, and somewhat regrettably, in length) with Harry and his friends. The nature of the dangers and the independence with which the children face them become increasingly threatening as the series continues, but at the same time, the other challenges in Harry’s life, both internal and external, are recognisable. He must deal with an unhappy home life, nasty classmates, seemingly unfair teachers, arguments with friends and romantic relationships as well as coming to terms with the loss of his parents, learning some unpleasant facts about his father and learning to channel his aggressive side. The knowledge he gains about himself and his background are also proportionate in each novel with his level of personal development.

Thirdly, Harry and his friends are clearly modern children. The detail about their clothing, the sweets, the different standards of brooms, and the envy of children with the best equipment and the teasing of children with lesser, including the Weasley’s worn out owl and Neville’s unglamorous toad) enables the reader to visualise the characters, to locate them within the society, and for children, to empathise with the characters and recognise similarities amongst their own friends.

I would recommend The Worst Witch to children newly independently reading.
It was made into a popular ITV programme. It has frequent illustrations, and Mildred’s adventures are great fun. Groosham Grange may appeal to fluent readers with a taste for puns and gore.  Witch Week to my mind is perhaps for readers with a little more endurance as readers- it is more of a slow burn than the others, but a child (or adult!) that has enjoyed Harry Potter would probably enjoy the Chrestomanci series. There is some fun Harry/ Mildred fan fiction here, if you’re a fan of both!