Bookworm

by Lucy Mangan

  It was followed in 1858 by Eric, or Little by Little by Frederic W. Farrar, which was even more muscularly Christian and even less fun. It tells the story of Eric Williams’ gradual corruption by the vices and follies available to him once he has been sent off to school. It begins with a desire to keep in with his schoolmates which prevents him from ‘expressing a manly disapproval of the general cheating’ that goes on in his form and soon he has gone totally to the dogs. There is drinking. In a pub. In vain do his pious best friend and brother expend their dying breaths exhorting him to change his ways and seek salvation, but alas, Eric attempts to escape his disgrace by running away to sea. He gets ill and comes home to die, repenting at last. And in case you were in any doubt about what you were supposed to take from it, Farrar’s preface reads: ‘The story of “Eric” was written with but one single object—the vivid inculcation of inward purity and moral purpose, by the history of a boy who, in spite of the inherent nobility of his disposition, falls into all folly and wickedness, until he has learnt to seek help from above. I am deeply thankful to know—from testimony public and private, anonymous and acknowledged—that this object has, by God’s blessing, been fulfilled.’

  You will be deeply thankful to know that things relaxed somewhat thereafter. By the time Talbot Baines Reed’s Fifth Form at St Dominic’s was published in 1881, which was the most popular of the many school stories he published, it had become the thing we think of now when we think of school stories – japes, mischief, comic and villainous staff, cosy studies, enduring friendships, sporting prowess and bravely borne accidents and injuries playing out over a term.

  Meanwhile, back in real life, (middle-class) girls were starting to be publicly educated too! They were moving out from under governesses’ skirts, into day schools and – come the early 1900s – boarding schools too. The stories duly followed, beginning with L. T. Meade in the 1890s, and on through the likes of May Baldwin, Dorothea Moore and Mrs George de Horne Vaizey, all of them Pulleinishly prolific but all dogged by a rather confused public attitude to their work: on the one hand, people (which is to say reviewers and opinion-makers, which is to say men) approved of their girls’ school stories because the authors never deemed a heroine worthy of the name until she was fully conversant with the art of denial, self-sacrifice and other feminine necessities – the distaff equivalent of the noble, manly, empire-building skills advocated in the boys’ books – but on the other hand … well, they were books written by women, about girls, and about just girls. Girls supporting each other, being busy, happy, productive and competent and altogether managing just fine without boys or men to make their lives meaningful. Their authority figures were female teachers and headmistresses (God and empire taking very much a back-seat role) who would dispense comfort, wisdom and discipline in roughly equal proportions from their book- and flower-filled studies, with occasional trips outside in inclement weather to rescue foolhardy charges blown over cliffs at midnight and catch lung infections, the better to bring home to them the consequences of thoughtless behaviour. (Though we must in all fairness note that none of them beat the headmaster of Kipling’s Stalky & Co., who attends the sickbed of day-pupil Stetson and sucks out through a tube the thick diphtheria mucus that is about to choke Stetson to death, knowing that he will probably contract the fatal disease himself as a result. If he doesn’t, he will almost certainly die of a surfeit of honour instead.)

  A world of happy, self-sufficient females was terrifically unsettling, what? Girls should be encouraged to read, but only the least challenging, least potentially corrupting stuff. Where did these school stories fall? Nobody knew.

  Because of this, and because it was so popular and popularity is always suspect, because it was by and for women, because anyone could – and it sometimes seemed, did – try their hand at it, the genre quickly became perceived as inferior and, as lesser writers copied tropes from abler ones and made them both simpler and more commonplace, also became slightly moribund.

  Then in 1906, like a wayward lacrosse ball into a swimming pool, Angela Brazil’s The Fortunes of Philippa, landed with a splash in the stagnant genre and started its revival. She wrote firmly from the schoolgirls’ point of view, happily incorporating their slang, wholly on their side. She was swiftly followed by Elsie J. Oxenham with Rosaly’s New School in 1913 and in 1920 by Dorita Fairlie Bruce with The Senior Prefect (later renamed Dimsie Goes to School). Fairlie Bruce was the first to write a series of school books about the same characters – Dimsie, the lively new girl with a spirit as irrepressible as her fine head of brown curls and her friends Erica (stern), Rosamund (soft), Jean (poet) and Pam (sporty) – and I found them all waiting for me on the shelves of Torridon Library.

  I had loved already Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers and St Clare’s series but the Dimsie books were an even more detailed and intriguing window onto a bygone scholastic and social era – when a sunny day meant teachers could spontaneously decide on a nature ramble without consulting the national curriculum, something called the honour of the school could be at stake and adolescence could be free of sex and full of sorority.

  They were a great solace to me. At ten, school, sex and sorority were giving me no end of trouble. As we all entered double figures, the split that had started three or four years earlier was complete. Where once boys and girls had played together happily, now they … didn’t. The girls had hived themselves off and stopped running around and getting sweaty. They played with each other’s hair and compared frilly ankle socks and fancy pencil cases instead. If a boy spoke to you now, you had to giggle instead of answer. The boys were baffled. I was baffled. I tried giggling once, but it was not to be. And now no one was allowed to read. If you were a girl it was because it was unfeminine and left you less time for comparing sock notes, and if you were a boy it was because it was unmanly and left you less time for football. I felt this was at the very least illogical but I couldn’t find anyone who cared, much less agreed with me, when I tried to point it out. I withdrew from the fray. Literally – I could read undisturbed, I discovered, in the outside loos. Cold in winter, smelly in summer, no one ever went as far as the last cubicle in the row or lingered in the outhouse longer than they had to. If I’d had the wit, I’d have taken a few cushions down there and decorated the place like Dimsie and her pals did their sixth-form studies in later books. Or added some wine and candles and called it a salon. A shiterary salon. Could’ve been nice.

  For Dimsie, by contrast, all was broad sunny uplands of both the real and metaphorical kind at the Jane Willard Foundation. Reading and learning of all sorts were encouraged. So were sports, but I was willing to overlook that. I couldn’t work out if it was because they were free of boys, modernity, or both, but the girls seemed able to be themselves. Yes, impractical daydreamer Jean (poet, remember) was frequently told to buck up, but that was fair enough. She did keep accidentally starting fires in potting sheds, after all. And Dimsie did form the Anti-Soppist League to curb Rosamund’s penchant for crushing on unsuitable seniors but this only gladdened my heart. Anti-soppism was exactly the movement I needed. It stood for everything I couldn’t put into words. It was anti-convention, it was anti-self-indulgence, it was, above all, anti-mindless-femininity. It gave those of us who couldn’t master the conventions a means of rejecting them and another banner to gather under. I say ‘us’. I mean ‘me’. I wouldn’t find another five like-minded souls in real life until I went to university, but thanks to Fairlie Bruce and her creations, I didn’t really need them.

  Of course, though I and innumerable other readers who through the vagaries of time, class, space and fortune had not managed to go to the Malory Willard St Winifred’s Chalet Foundation took these tales as virtual reportage, the schools, these enclaves of spirited yet honourable girls and dedicated teachers, were always idealisations. If reading were purely about providing us with accurate renderings of social history, this would be a problem. But of course it’s not, and it wasn’t. However buffed and polished the
setting and the selection of characters, the deeper truths remained. Theirs was a world that pointed towards a different way of organising things, a different set of priorities (some of them deliciously intangible – it wasn’t until I had read my way several times through the series that this nebulous concept of ‘honour’, for instance, be it individual or ‘of the school’ began to resolve into some kind of comprehensible shape) and beyond that, to the idea that nothing is immutable. Ars longa, even when shaped by genre constraints. Vita remains remarkably brevis.

  It wasn’t until many years later – when I actually was at university, in fact, haunting the Haunted Bookshop in St Edward’s Passage in Cambridge and gradually piecing together a collection of Dimsie editions from the 1920s and 30s, of which the owner always kept a plentiful stock – that I realised that the colourful hardbacks in the library had been modernised editions. They had still seemed wonderfully old-fashioned to me, but the real things had a much more distinctive tang. However carefully you update a book, and especially one from a genre like the girls’ school story which is so redolent of a particular time and place, you are interpolating something between the reader and the writing and creating detachment. When you read original Dimsies (or Brazils or Oxenhams), whatever their flaws, they speak untrammelled early twentieth century to you. They speak without irony, without muddied waters, without self-consciousness, without fear of parody. They feel as young, bold and innocent as their heroines themselves. A different time, living on between buckram covers for as long as there are people willing to open them.

  Just how long that will be, I don’t know. Their popularity began to lessen in the late 1950s as private boarding and day schools became, with the advent of free secondary education after the Second World War, a thing of the past. Now, the better part of a century on from when most of them first appeared, they are ancient relics. To come across them at all at the right age requires the tomes either to have been passed down through at least four generations of readers and still to be lingering on accessible family bookshelves, awaiting discovery, or for a ten-year-old to have a particularly early affinity with second-hand bookshops and the wherewithal to fund what can now be a fairly expensive habit. In my day, Elinor Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School books, recounting the adventures of Joey Bettany, Mary-Lou Trelawney and Len Maynard at school in Austria/Guernsey/the Welsh borders/Switzerlandfn4 were still on sale in shops (albeit updated versions again, for Fontana – like the recent bowdlerised Blytons they did not, apparently, sell well) and they were still a potent enough cultural presence to make plays such as Daisy Pulls it Off a success. Now they and the world they dwelled in and which dwelled in them have slipped beyond the immediate reach of folk memory and I suspect there is little chance of their popularity returning.

  There are clay tablets dating from around 2000 BC recounting anecdotes set in schools for the entertainment of ancient Sumerian child readers, and similar texts – the colloquia scholastica – were common in medieval England, and included all the banter, bullying, laziness and cheeking of teachers that has apparently been the mainstay of the educational experience since it began. There have always been and always will be plenty of stories set in school, for at least as long as children go to school. But they are not the school stories of yore. Yore’s gone, and with it its stories. Rosamund would no doubt weep. The rest of us must just stop being so madly maudlin and simply buck up.

  But I am getting ahead of myself. Let us return to my new hopes for my new school.

  I reckoned that the fact that it would be all girls, plus the maturity we would all gain over the summer – we would be eleven by the time we started the term! Eleven! I wondered if I should start saving for a pensionfn5 – meant that I was almost certain to find myself in Catford’s answer to the Jane Willard, or – at a pinch – St Clare’s. The details would be different – skirts instead of tunics, tarmacked playground instead of lacrosse pitches, a bus down the high street every day instead of termly drop-offs from a steam train – but beneath that? SAME.

  Thus it was that I discovered that as well as expanding your mind, your consciousness, your empathetic facilities, your vocabulary, your sense of awe and wonder at the multitudinous possibilities offered by the world, books could also lie through their teeth.

  9

  Darkness Rising

  Secondary School and, Not Unrelatedly, Dystopia

  OH, LOOK, IT wasn’t too bad. So people wouldn’t leave you alone to read and hated you if you tried. So there were no outdoor loos to escape to. So life became an even greater welter of unspoken and fast-changing rules about everything from acceptable skirt length (labia-skimming) and first bra (Tammy Girl, padded) to schoolbags (Chelsea Girl only or you might as well not even bother, yeah?) to bands (I don’t know – I got lost after Bros) to smoking (Consulate, upstairs in McDonald’s, like a lady, not Burger King). These things are sent to try us.

  At least secondary school had a better library. A full classroom of wooden shelves, all round the walls and extra ones sticking out into the room. It was proper. It even had a few little carrels here and there – high-sided nooks where you could work or read almost unseen. Sit there and it was like having your own personal section of a Womble burrow.

  I needed the security, for two reasons. First, because I had just discovered dystopian fiction. This was new to me, and fairly new to the world of children’s books as a whole. Although the world of fables and fairy tales and the golden age of railway children and secret gardens had been smashed to pieces by the cosh of two world wars, the growing realism of children’s fiction that replaced it took a while to shake off fully the impulse to protect young readers and embrace presenting them with Possible Worse Fates instead. You need time to recover from real-life catastrophes before you can bear to face and posit new ones to come. Authors like John Christopher – maybe more safely distanced by the double remove of writing not just fiction but science fiction – got there first, in the late 1960s, with books such as his Tripods trilogy (later quartet), wherein the human race is enslaved by their ‘cappings’ by an alien race, to be followed by the likes of Peter Dickinson’s The Changes series (‘science fiction without the science’ he called his story of the human race turning against machinery and regressing to a feudal state).

  My introduction to the genre was through the two that perhaps best symbolised and distilled the nuclear anxiety of the 1970s and 80s: Robert Swindells’ Brother in the Land and Robert C. O’Brien’s Z for Zachariah, two tales of post-nuclear-war survival so harrowing that I couldn’t keep them in the house. Lucy Donovan’s cousin Sophie had lent me the former and I kept having to return it to her and re-borrow it the next day, so that I could read and try and process once more the unsparing story of Danny and his attempts to look after his younger brother Ben as their fellow survivors become increasingly desperate and those in charge steadily more tyrannical. Anyone disabled, injured or shocked beyond help (‘spacers’, they’re called) is poisoned or shot. A concentration camp is established, prompting the formation of a rebel movement that – for a brief and shining moment, until it becomes clear that the irradiated, barren land will make it impossible for anyone to survive for long – seems set to carry the day. The story’s careful detail (the hair falling out in clumps, the ‘trillions of deadly radioactive particles … settling like an invisible snow on the devastated earth’) and psychological truth (the survivors grow ruthless by degrees as resources and hope diminish) made it compelling and almost unbearable at the same time. Forced to confront unspeakable horrors and follow them through with Danny to the quietly shattering end I closed the covers each time with a sigh of relief and some disbelief that I had survived.

  Z for Zachariah belonged to the school library and I read it there when I couldfn1 and then put it firmly back on the shelf until the next time.fn2 Back then I found the story of Ann, a lone survivor on a remote farm, and her relationship with a radiation-poisoned man, John Loomis, whom she nurses back to some kind of health after he stum
bles across her home a year after the war, slightly less traumatic than Brother in the Land (at least once I had got over the shock that the same mind that had given me lovely Mrs Frisby was also capable of creating this). But now, the multiple threats posed by the controlling and manipulative Loomis strike me the hardest. He is emblematic, in a way I didn’t appreciate then, of a kind of man that is if anything more threatening, through the sheer weight of his numbers, before an apocalypse than after, when there are only a few lives left to ruin.

  By the end of those two, I felt I’d come a very long way from Milly-Molly-Mandy.

  Rereading them now still harrows my inner twelve-year-old but it gives the rest of me a twisted hankering after a simpler time. From this distance – O tempora! O mores! O Brexit! O Trump! – we seem to have had it easy. One major worry, one simple solution: read the cautionary tales and don’t set off The Bomb. Job done!

  All in all, it’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world out there. Perhaps the best and only real remedy there is is to grab a good book-cum-survival manual, hunker down and pray for daylight. Meet me in the bunker – but if you come with Brother in the Land, please, please, please, keep it to yourself.

  Just as I was getting to grips with these page-bound horrors, real life dropped something of a bomb on us all too. My dad – very quietly – went and got cancer. The world was quite dystopian altogether.

  He had been – very quietly – under the weather for ages. He had what seemed like flu for so long that it eventually became obvious that it wasn’t flu at all and the GP started sending him for tests. My parents tried to keep it from us, but they were relatively unpractised in the secretive arts and we knew something was up. At one point, when doctors were still cycling through possible diagnoses, we overheard my mother on the phone to Grandma, saying something about ‘Legionnaire’s disease’. In a moment that demonstrates as neatly as any moment ever could the fundamental difference between my sister and mud-turtle me, my sister headed straight for the dictionary to work it out and I waited to be told. Unfortunately, it didn’t have the actual phrase, so her research only ended in further confusion. We understood that having little members of the French Foreign Legion walking about inside you would make you feel unwell, but not how they would get there. I thought maybe he had caught it when we watched the TV series Beau Geste a few years earlier and the soldiers had lain dormant in his blood before … I don’t know, going to war over his lymph glands? We had heard that phrase being whispered too. No, the whole thing was implausible. We knew we must have missed a step somewhere along the way.