Life must be filled up

I like these books well enough that I went to some trouble to get the set. I’m glad now that I did; a quick search online found no copies at all of the third and fifth books. The books are well written, which you’d expect as Winfred Donald taught English. Linda and her sister travel to school each day by train, a good start for me because I like day school stories. There are very few school scenes but they are realistic. Linda is a good actress (believable) and also a mistress of disguise (less believable). This is how she solves most of the mysteries, by changing her appearance so dramatically that no one would guess she was a schoolgirl. As you can see from the titles, the family travel around, so each book has a different setting. However unlikely the adventures, the books are all lively and entertaining, so should you be lucky enough to see a copy anywhere, I’d grab it.

The Linda books, all published by Hutchinson
Linda – The Schoolgirl Detective, 1949
Linda in Lucerne, 1950
Linda and the Silver Greyhounds, 1952
Linda in Cambridge, 1955
Linda in New York, 1956

I love Jane Shaw. When I was a child, I had the Susan books which were published by The Children’s Press and read them over and over again, always finding them funny. Susan Pulls the Strings is still on my comfort reading list. Even as a child, I longed to live in the Carmichael’s house, opposite the Dulwich Picture Gallery. Alas, such a house would cost millions today, or I’d move there like a shot. I also had Bernese Adventure and Breton Adventure. Little did I know back then that there were more Susan books, that the ‘Adventures’ had previously been published as ‘Holidays’ nor that there was a third, extremely rare book about Sara and Caroline: Highland Holiday. Plus, a lot more books as well as the short stories which appeared in annuals. So, my collection was made as an adult and a number of the books I have were bought from Australia, which seemed then to be the home of many books it was hard to find here (oh, happy days).
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I’ve enjoyed Elly Griffiths’ Dr Ruth Galloway mysteries, so when I learned that she’d written a children’s book about a schoolgirl detective, I just had to read it. Luckily, the publishers and NetGalley obliged and I got an advance proof copy.

When Justice Jones’ mother dies, her father, a criminal barrister, sends her to boarding school on Romney Marsh. Her first sight of the forbidding building makes her think it has ‘potential for murder’. As she’s never been to any school before, the rules, the terrible food and the cold are a shock to her. But almost as soon as she arrives, she learns that there’s been a death in the school which seems to have been hushed up and she’s on the case. I needed several clues before I was able to set the story between the wars. Justice finds that she’s hopeless at lacrosse but advanced in Latin, thanks to her mother's teaching. Some girls are snobbish and hostile but she chums up with nice Stella and with Dorothy, one of the servants, who will both help in her investigations.

As winter creeps on the cold intensifies, snow sets in and the school is cut off from the outside world. Justice doesn’t know who to trust when there’s another unexplained death. Why are so many people wandering about the old building in the night? Could even the charming yet scary headmistress, Miss de Vere, be involved? There are more murder attempts and it takes all Justice’s resourcefulness and courage, with the loyalty of her new friends, to discover the criminal at work in their midst. It helps that she’s read all her father’s murder cases and her mother’s detective novels.

I see this book is recommended for fans of Enid Blyton, presumably because the school has four towers, for I can see no other connection. Justice is far more like Flavia de Luce than any of Blyton’s heroines. If you enjoy Robin Stevens’ Wells & Wong mysteries, you’ll love this. It’s a genuine school story in the classic mould but with a brilliant twist. It’s out on 2nd May and I recommend it highly to all lovers of both school and detective fiction.

The popularity of Call the Midwife is astonishing but it’s only the most recent in a long line of TV medical dramas. Remember Emergency Ward 10? Dr Kildare? (You have to be old.) Most series involve hospitals and I don’t watch any of them. I have, however, read quite a lot of books about nursing. Most are romances in which Nurse marries Doctor and don’t interest me much. What I have read is a large number of nursing career books aimed at girls. Now, they’re a fascinating glimpse into how much nursing has changed over the years.

All this is merely to flag up Lucilla Andrews, doyenne of the hospital romance. I’ve never read any of her books but here’s good news for those who like her stories and have searched for them in vain: a few are now available for the Kindle, quite cheaply.
( pics of nursing stories )

I was nudged into (re)reading these books by various mentions of them elsewhere. I began with Kitty Barne’s She shall have Music, first published in 1938 and illustrated by Ruth Jervis. I’d read it as a child and this is what I remembered: a girl wants to play the piano but can only practise on an old piano in a church hall; a woman called Rosalba offers to give her proper lessons; she’s entered for a music festival and the judge awards her no marks because of the terrible style she’s copied from Rosalba.

I loved it when I borrowed it from the library all those years ago but time has not been kind to this book. From the start, it seemed so like a Noel Streatfeild story (they were related by marriage and discussed their work). Much as I love Ballet Shoes and always will, I’m not an admirer of Streatfeild’s style. The Forrests are a typical ‘poor’ family. Mother has to bring up four children alone (no mention of Pa). They sell their home in Ireland with its contents and move to a rented house in Bristol. Naturally, faithful Biddy leaves her beloved Ireland to come with them and do all the work. It’s a mystery what mother does, apart from a little mending. What she does not do is notice that her youngest daughter, Karen, is extremely musical. It’s left to Biddy and the charwoman at the parish hall to arrange for her to practise what she learns once a week with nice Aunt Anne. They can afford the rent of a large house in the country for the summer holidays but not piano lessons for a gifted child. Karen’s future is entirely arranged for her by the kindness of strangers and her own determination. I find it hard to believe any mother could be so apparently indifferent to what her child gets up to. Even her brother and sisters are more supportive. There is some good stuff about music in the book, but not enough.
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Chris in Command, Irene Mossop (1930)
Hazel, Head Girl, Nancy Breary (1952)
Margery Merton’s Girlhood, Alice Corkran (1888)
The Exciting Journey, Norman Dale (1947)
Boys of the Valley School, R A H Goodyear (1925)

I’ve read several old children’s books this month, so here’s a little chat about them.

When I read Lois in Charge followed by Chris in Command and Hazel, Head Girl, I was going to say, ‘What a bossy lot!’ It turned out though that Hazel wasn’t bossy at all: in fact, not bossy enough. I must here fess up and say that I don’t much care for Nancy Breary, or find her books hilariously funny. She’s one of several authors about whom I disagree with Sims & Clare, much as I admire their book, kept permanently by my desk. In Hazel, Head Girl, Breary makes use of the well worn plotline of two schools merging, with resultant feuds and jealousies. Mill House and Dewpoint combine to form Hessington. The girls are determined to hate each other and stick to the habits (and uniform) of their old schools. Hazel, from Dewpoint, has been appointed head girl before term starts. Some people think this is because she’s a heroine. (She took over the controls of a plane after the pilot had a heart attack and landed it safely!) Unfortunately for her, Vice Captain Lydia (from Mill House), is determined to oust her and become head girl herself. Hazel doesn’t take a firm enough line over this rebellion and nasty Lydia nearly gets her way. The juniors are fiercely partisan and a bunch of silly little idiots. As so often in school stories, the girls seem to run everything, with teachers and lessons completely ignored. Hazel bravely struggles on, trying to persuade the girls to give their loyalty to their new school and become Hessington girls.
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It’s ages since I read anything by the prolific Bessie Marchant, famed for giving her heroines a hard time in exotic locations. In this book, Lois lives on a coffee plantation in Brazil. From the start it’s difficult to work out all the complications of her family with its half sisters and a stepbrother who really isn’t. A friend tells Lois that she’s never known such a muddled up family. I eventually worked it out like this. Mrs Scarsdale had a son, Jim, and another child who died at the same time as his father. She then married Mr Murray and they had three beautiful daughters. When she died, leaving her girls very well off, Mr Murray married the governess and Lois is their daughter. It’s heavily pointed out several times that Jim is ‘no kin at all’ to Lois, and you can guess why.

Unlike her sisters, Lois is not beautiful (they call her Cinderella) and she knows she’s not very clever, either. She is however very practical and quite a feminist because she wants to work (this book dates from 1919). She’s annoyed by Jim’s critical attitude to her working on the ranch and seeming to want women to be merely ornamental. ‘She tried to imagine a world peopled only by ornamental women, but failed so utterly that she had to fall back on the other side of the picture, and imagine for herself what the world would be like if every girl and woman lived up to the capacity within her, and tried to do her very best in the situation in which she had been placed. But the situation was too Utopian even for the fertile fancy of Lois;’

All is not well amongst the coffee growers because of the evil Black Hand Gang, which blackmails ranch owners into handing over considerable sums of dosh and killing them if they don’t oblige. Jim has his own ranch up river from the Murray’s and suddenly disappears. Lois, who has helped her father for so long that she knows a lot about plantation work, steps into the breach and starts to tackle the manager, whose cruelty to the workers appals her. She finds that Jim has had a warning letter from the gang, which explains his disappearance. She is convinced he is alive but fails to see what is blindingly obvious to the reader but which I won’t reveal. If you can look beyond some of the racial attitudes and snobbery in this book, it’s rather a good read about the triumph of hard work and common sense over idleness and frivolity.

It was absolutely freezing at the market this morning, but see what I bought.
I love the outward facing flower which means you don’t have to turn it up to see its loveliness. It's far too cold to go out and plant it now, so it's living in the porch for the moment.


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Quite a few years ago, I picked up a copy of Phyllis Matthewman’s Timber Girl at a car boot sale. I had no idea it was a scarce book, I was just attracted to it by the subject matter and the New Forest setting. It’s about the Lumber Jills, as the women in the Timber Corps were called. They’re much less well known today than the Land Girls. I found that Matthewman had also written a Land Girl book, Jill on the Land, and have been searching for a reasonably priced copy ever since. One came up on ebay recently but went for much more than I was prepared to pay, so I was pleased when Abe offered me quite a cheap one.

Phyllis Matthewman (1896–1979) wrote school stories and romances. She was a close friend of Elinor Brent-Dyer. The two war-focused books mentioned above are a mixture of propaganda and romance; they aim to show what the women’s work was like and to emphasise its importance, then throw in a love story for light relief. In each case the girls take an immediate dislike to a man they meet early in the book, so if you know your Pride and Prejudice you guess straight away which way things will head.



Are these girls’ books or adult romances? At the back of Jill (1942) there are advertisements for two of Matthewman’s school stories and for one of Patience Gilmour’s Swans books about Rangers. Jill is a shorter book and the love story is dealt with more perfunctorily than in Timber Girl (1944). I think Timber Girl is the better of the two. There’s a much better sense of place; the New Forest is well described, whereas Jill’s farm could have been almost anywhere. It’s interesting that Jan, the Timber Girl, feels that the Forest has remained unchanged for centuries, as much of it is still just as Matthewman describes it. The work is explained in more detail (it’s almost too instructional in places) and the love story takes up far more of the book. So I think this one was intended for older girls.

I did enjoy reading both books (re-reading in the case of Timber Girl), but there are certain tics in Matthewman’s writing which can irritate. I lost count of the number of times the girls are described as looking ‘trim’ in their uniforms. Another annoyance is the bizarre universal accent she applies to any country person. She herself lived in Surrey, yet she has the Surrey farming folk in Jill speaking a strange version of Mummerset. The New Forest people speak in the same way and it doesn’t sound very Hampshire to me. Nevertheless the books do shed an interesting light on the wartime experiences of young women who gave up the comforts of home in order to do strenuous and sometimes dangerous work. In Timber Girl in particular, there’s a strong emphasis on the way educated girls like Jan get on very well with girls ‘from all walks of life’ i.e. from inferior backgrounds. There’s even a suggestion that the war is in some ways a good thing, because it will shake everything up and lead to a better world in which class differences will be less important. I find these books well worth reading.
Other wartime farming books for girls reviewed here.

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Clover Cottage, Frances Cowen, 1958
Young Solario, Marjorie Siddall, 1951
Windmill Hill, Wyn Brocklebank, 1962
The House by the Sea, Hilda Boden, 1962

I have a weakness for children’s books in the second (or even third) rank, often ‘Reward’ books, the kind which were given out as prizes. After immersing myself in new autumn books for a while, I went back in time and read some cosy Girlsown-style books. I have several books by Frances Cowen and I think most people will know The Secret of Grange Farm and The Secret of the Loch. I’ve always thought her a good writer. I looked her up to check the publishing dates of Clover Cottage and found that the British Library lists fifty four books by her, only a few of them for children. Clover Cottage is a happy family tale. Father is often away at sea, Mother lives in a basement flat with elder daughter Margaret (the heroine), a set of twins and a baby. It’s hard work, money is short and when schools break up for the summer, there’s not much chance of a holiday away from the town. Then a solicitor’s letter arrives, telling Mother she’s inherited a cottage in the country. The cottage is in a poor state of repair but Margaret falls in love with it and is convinced they can improve it and live there. The family go to stay on a nearby farm and the rest of the book is about the restoration of the cottage, with a couple of mysteries and a late spanner in the works to spice it up. This book is for you if, like me, you enjoy stories about houses and housekeeping.
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