School Stories Save The Day (and the half-term)

What a dismal, dreary, deluge of a half term it’s been. Cubs camp was a wash-out; the picnic planned for Tuesday was too. My daughter lost her voice (I take my blessings where I find them, ashamed though I am to admit it), and I finally succumbed to the full-blown flu bug that I‘d been fighting off for a week. The silver lining in this case was that R was able to take a day off, instead of breezily waving me goodbye, passport in hand, so I did what I haven’t done in years – allowed myself to be ill and went to bed for the day. I wanted to read, but couldn’t face anything that I picked up; I had the concentration span of a gnat and even a paperback felt too heavy. Magazines didn’t work, either; I wanted to be totally taken out of myself, and their focus on celebrities/current affairs/home make-overs smacked too much of the real world. So I lay there feeling sorry for myself, and then suddenly remembered the boxes of books that I’d brought back with me when my parents moved and I had to clear out the cupboards which held the detritus – and treasures - of my childhood. I dug out a pile of puffin paperbacks, whole series of school stories with dazzling, heroic titles full of exclamation marks: “Henrietta Saves The Day!”, “The Best Term Ever!”, “The New Tuck-Shop!” I was lost to a world of lacrosse sticks, butch games mistresses and hopelessly inefficient French Mam’zelles, just as I had been as a 10 year old. The lightest of reads, I was able to get through several in one afternoon, and I marvelled – I really did – at what writers were allowed to get away with over fifty years ago. The plots are predictable and paper thin - though I remember them, of course, as utterly compelling and gripping – and usually centre, in a slightly sadistic way, on some schoolgirl getting above herself, coming an inevitable cropper, and being saved/taught a lesson/reprimanded by the heroine, whose British character and schoolgirl pluck ensure her inevitable triumph. Anyone showing a modicum of originality or talent is slapped down; the girl with a beautiful voice who breaks bounds to enter a singing contest gets pneumonia and loses the beautiful voice – for ever, natch. The girl who’s too good at games and wants to go professional (how very un-British) swims too far against the current and gets her legs dashed on rocks (I know, quite savage, but as a girl I lapped up all this divine retribution). The worst scorn is, of course, reserved for the foreigners; there is often a wild Spanish girl, usually half-gipsy, who’s parents run a circus, but she can never settle down to the rigours of school life and generally runs back to the circus. The French are continually sending their daughters to English boarding schools, it appears, in the vain hope that they may develop the prized English Sense of Honour, but of course they can’t – they’re too French. A direct quote: “But Suzanne was French. She would never have the same sense of responsibility that the British girls had”. They’re universally hopeless at games, too, standing shivering on the side of the pool until a hearty British girl shoves them in – teaching them, of course, to lose their idle foreign ways. The working classes are magnificently ignored, on the whole; wonderfully sweet, with their funny accents and willingness to labour for the school, so long as they know their place. If any of them dare to send their daughters to the school, having got rich quick in some shady scheme, they are destined to failure; the Headmistress will avoid them on speech day or enquire who the funny little man is; the girls usually leave after a term, because of course they can’t learn ways of the British upper class, either.

The funny thing is, is that I remember seeing all of this as a child – my sister and I used to giggle at the treatment of foreigners, and at the ludicrous and never-changing speeches of the Headmistresses – but I devoured them all the same. In fact I used to beg my parents to send me to boarding school. Perhaps I felt I needed to learn that sense of honour and fit in, too. And what’s even stranger is that I devoured them all over again the other day, too. Maybe it was just the sense of nostalgia that they evoked, the memories of reading them with a torch under the bedclothes, the recognition of their place in my childhood. I had a great afternoon, though, and was immensely cheered up. I’ve got all my old pony stories too, though they will have to wait for another day. Freud would have had a field day with those.