REVIEW: Doris's High School Days
Feb. 22nd, 2017 06:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllThis has to be the most ill-timed review I've ever posted, but I also read and enjoyed this book over the weekend, before I knew that there was going to be a Storm Doris. I've overheard a conversation bemoaning the use of the name 'Doris' - it's associated with nice women, apparently!
Doris’s High School Days: Clarice March. Blackie
A few pages in, I was feeling disheartened – the dustjacket features three girls in their late teens in a park-like setting. Also, on the hinge or whatever it’s really called, there’s a much younger girl, with a bob, perched on a suitcase. But I started reading and it turned out Doris Boyd was an eight year old, in the middle of a temper tantrum. I also felt that the writer was overdoing it with the prose, but gradually the story won me over.
Doris is the youngest of three, brother Harry being aged fourteen and sister Amy ten. Amy is a quiet reader, while Doris is not, untidy and careless, but she’s old enough, her father judges, for him to reclaim his wife, for Major Boyd is stationed in India and has been working there alone while the children were being brought up in Devon. Now, the focal point of the children’s lives is to leave England and the girls’ lives are to undergo a great upheaval. They are to move to London and attend a high school, while boarding with their mother’s old governess.
There is a great deal of detail about the girls’ first year at Hammersmith High School, where Doris is put into Lower First, and, at times, shows no capacity to rise from it. So much so that I presume the writer is fictionalising her own experience either as a schoolgirl or a schoolmistress – the story is set in Victoria’s era, when girls were not allowed to bicycle and there are a few quaint descriptions of a goat in Piccadilly and traffic of a different nature to today’s diesel cars clogging up the streets of the capital city. The touch about one of the sisters keeping the telegram their mother sent them just before boarding her ship is an authentic, suggestive detail. I can’t find that the school itself was real.
Doris and Amy are not the only boarders at Mrs Hall’s, and most of the others attend the school too, but there’s a Mrs Trent and her daughter Minnie, and Mrs Trent dislikes the idea of a high school and keeps her daughter as much apart from the other girls as possible. But the high school is shown in a favourable light, with mistresses like Doris’s form mistress Miss Bailey doing their best to give interesting lessons and having to answer daft questions from girls who have not taken in what they were told only a week ago. Doris does not shine academically and sometimes gets into scrapes – getting into a really bad one when she falls under the bad influence of an older girl. The thought of having to admit to all this in the weekly letter to mother doesn’t ever check her in time. Apart from the scrape that I referred to – and it could have happened, it certainly gives Doris a brush with another type of London her sheltered self never imagined – it’s all realistic detail, from the nicknames for the mistresses to the first visit to the Underground, couched in a slightly old-fashioned, discursive way: ‘Dear me, what memories that garden held, and always would hold, for the children!’
My copy was awarded to its first reader in 1935 – I wouldn’t be surprised if it had first been published earlier.
The focus is on Doris, with Amy coming second, and we conclude with a chapter about the end of Doris’s school days, learning that, for one thing, due to her lack of concentrated industry, she never made it to the sixth! But that’s all right, she did learn other stuff over the eleven years or so that she was at her high school.
Doris’s High School Days: Clarice March. Blackie
A few pages in, I was feeling disheartened – the dustjacket features three girls in their late teens in a park-like setting. Also, on the hinge or whatever it’s really called, there’s a much younger girl, with a bob, perched on a suitcase. But I started reading and it turned out Doris Boyd was an eight year old, in the middle of a temper tantrum. I also felt that the writer was overdoing it with the prose, but gradually the story won me over.
Doris is the youngest of three, brother Harry being aged fourteen and sister Amy ten. Amy is a quiet reader, while Doris is not, untidy and careless, but she’s old enough, her father judges, for him to reclaim his wife, for Major Boyd is stationed in India and has been working there alone while the children were being brought up in Devon. Now, the focal point of the children’s lives is to leave England and the girls’ lives are to undergo a great upheaval. They are to move to London and attend a high school, while boarding with their mother’s old governess.
There is a great deal of detail about the girls’ first year at Hammersmith High School, where Doris is put into Lower First, and, at times, shows no capacity to rise from it. So much so that I presume the writer is fictionalising her own experience either as a schoolgirl or a schoolmistress – the story is set in Victoria’s era, when girls were not allowed to bicycle and there are a few quaint descriptions of a goat in Piccadilly and traffic of a different nature to today’s diesel cars clogging up the streets of the capital city. The touch about one of the sisters keeping the telegram their mother sent them just before boarding her ship is an authentic, suggestive detail. I can’t find that the school itself was real.
Doris and Amy are not the only boarders at Mrs Hall’s, and most of the others attend the school too, but there’s a Mrs Trent and her daughter Minnie, and Mrs Trent dislikes the idea of a high school and keeps her daughter as much apart from the other girls as possible. But the high school is shown in a favourable light, with mistresses like Doris’s form mistress Miss Bailey doing their best to give interesting lessons and having to answer daft questions from girls who have not taken in what they were told only a week ago. Doris does not shine academically and sometimes gets into scrapes – getting into a really bad one when she falls under the bad influence of an older girl. The thought of having to admit to all this in the weekly letter to mother doesn’t ever check her in time. Apart from the scrape that I referred to – and it could have happened, it certainly gives Doris a brush with another type of London her sheltered self never imagined – it’s all realistic detail, from the nicknames for the mistresses to the first visit to the Underground, couched in a slightly old-fashioned, discursive way: ‘Dear me, what memories that garden held, and always would hold, for the children!’
My copy was awarded to its first reader in 1935 – I wouldn’t be surprised if it had first been published earlier.
The focus is on Doris, with Amy coming second, and we conclude with a chapter about the end of Doris’s school days, learning that, for one thing, due to her lack of concentrated industry, she never made it to the sixth! But that’s all right, she did learn other stuff over the eleven years or so that she was at her high school.
