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I mentioned Mollie Hazeldene’s Schooldays by Maud Forsey in my previous post. This blog post about its prequel Jack and Me gives the date of first publication as 1924 and suggests both books have autobiographical elements to them.

That would certainly explain the scrappy feel of this story, which does read more like an account of someone's memories than other first person girls own stories, and the narrator, an older Mollie, refers to a boy she knew dying in wartime in France, so it’s set earlier. At the age of 15, Mollie is sent from London to a residential school in the country in the hope of toning her down a little, for she’s a lively girl, but she remains a mischievous schoolgirl, and has to pay for it, a little, because that is the reputation she's earned. The school has a nice tradition of one of the senior girls being appointed as a school mother for each new girl. The other girls in Mollie’s dorm play a big part of her school life, and for all the French phrases they dropped into their speech it struck me that they all were badly in need of an education.

Shamrocks for Janith wasn’t quite what I expected – I thought it was going to be a Guide story, but it’s pitched rather older. Janith has lost her mother and, through no fault of her own, her job, and so must go over to Northern Ireland to stay with her uncle and his family. Her uncle is taking her in out of duty, which he and his wife rigidly believe in; Janith’s cousin Lorraine is mysterious, but has taken on the rearing of her nephew Brian, because Lorraine’s widowed sister-in-law Olive is a gadfly. As Janith tries to make a place for herself, making friends and finding a way to help her new community and an old friend, she has to face small frustrations and larger dilemmas. If this were a longer review, I’d subject you to a lot of rambling about the handling of its Northern Irish setting, but I’ll just say that if you like EBD and EJO (John Oxenham gets quoted, although for all the talk about God, the Bible doesn’t) you might like this.

I watched Roald Dahl’s Esio Trot, and it was altogether delightful. I must have read the story, because it would have come out when I was in my Dahl phase, but I didn’t remember any of it – I presume a good deal was added to make a feature-length show, anyhow. I loved the look of it, the warm hues, Mr Hoppy’s beautiful garden set off by the improbably always blue London sky, and Judi Dench looking ravishing, as one character put it, as Mrs Silver, the object of Mr Hoppy’s devotion. Hoffman and she are such class acts, but I also very much liked James Corden as the fourth-wall breaking narrator, who was telling the story to us, people on the bus and Roberta, who turned out to be a part of the story. It was funny and touching with its nudge to seize the day, although perhaps 100 tortoises in a flat are a bit too much. A real treat.

I also read Rose Under Fire, the sequel to Code Name Verity, about which I couldn’t write much, but this novel demands some response. Both are shattering, having created vivid, human characters living through extraordinary times. Rose’s book doesn’t quite play the same narrative games, being more or less writings in a book that her friend Maddie has given her, at a time when fancy paper must have been like gold dust. But what happens to Rose Justice, pilot, poet, American Girl Scout and tall seventeen year old after she leaves France and to the girls and women she meets is remarkable and powerfully depicted. This book made me think seriously about the nature of evil.