DISCUSSION: Historicity and context, or lack thereof

[feather_ghyll]

Quote:
'For your next subject, girls," she went on, addressing the form, "I want you to write a dialogue between a girl of fifty years ago and yourself. You may discuss anything you like with her-- school, games hobbies, outside sports, such as riding and boating. Oh yes, girls in the early years of the century played hockey and tennis and cricket and went swimming and riding and cycling, though I think you would have found differences. For instance, in those days, most girls rode side-saddle and swimsuits were much more bulky than they are now."

"But how can we find out about the differences?" Dorothy Jane asked, horror-stricken.

"If you look in the bottom cupboard of the junior library you will find a number of school-stories of that date--May Baldwins, for instance, and the early Angela Brazils and Dorothea Moores and even a few of L.T.Meades. Those will help you. I kept them on purpose for this sort of thing when we turned most of them out of the library to make room for more modern stories. You will find plenty to say once you have begun, I assure you..."'

BEECHY OF THE HARBOUR SCHOOL: Elinor Brent-Dyer, Oliphants, 1955, pages 35-6.

This quote jumped out at me rather. I probably started reading school stories in the mid to late eighties, beginning on my mother's hand-me-downs, then going on to what the local charity shop and book stalls at school fairs had to offer. Mostly, my book collection has been accumulated haphazardly in a serendipitous fashion - a contrast with my obsessive insistence on reading a series in chronological order in later years. But really, I'm so grateful to get any of these books, that I don't much care in what order. Add to that that by the time I get a hold of a copy, the dust jacket is often lost, lending an undistinctive 'any old hardback' look to it, and then many publishers (Blackie) seem to feel that there's no need to record the date the book was published.

Add to that the generic nature of most school stories: usually a new girl goes to a school and is probably put into the fourth form, she gets introduced to a motley crew made up of familiar types and usually makes one enemy, and has some contact with a senior girl. There's an adventure or a sporting triumph and possibly illness. By the end of the term, the enemy has been neutralised, the new girl is a 'real' member of her school's community and the senior girl probably leaves for the grown up world, thinking 'her' school is in good hands. That is a not unfamiliar plot, surely.

I admit to being a lax reader, but the boarding school life described was more or less alien to me, a world where the telephone resided in the headmistress's office, where Latin and Botany were taught and girls played lacrosse or went swimming in the school's swimming pool. To a large degree, then, it's all set in some hazy, golden world where time doesn't much matter beyond the seasons and the point in the school year. It's a fantasy place, and if I were asked to guess the decade, I'd get it wrong, oftener than not, because, for me, many of the books are timeless.

There are, of course some books that have obvious clues, some books that are clearly set in the Second World War and deal with it in a head-on fashion (Brent-Dyer's Chalet School series is an excellent example. Off hand 'Strangers at the Farm School' and 'Joanna Goes to School' are others). In fact, last year I was reading a May Baldwin 'Three Pickles In an Out of School' (I'm writing from memory, I may not have got the title precisely right), which is set during the First World War and follows three young girls and their young aunt, who has left her war work as a military driver in France, to look after them. Even I couldn't miss the war-time setting.

But - and I hesitate to admit this, given that I've just joined new_atalanta, I hadn't ever heard of L.T. Meade until reading the passage quoted above. Or, as I hadn't got a book by her, she hadn't really registered. I will, of course, now keep an eye out for her work as I browse at bookshops and book stalls in future.