If you had to go to boarding school...

[callmemadam]

...which fictional one would you choose? I thought this article in the Grauniad deserved a wider audience than the mailing list I got it from. When I was young, it was definitely Malory Towers for me, mainly for the romantic setting (the four towers) and the uniform! Plus the girls actually do quite a lot of work. The fictional schools I'm fond of now tend to be small and unusual: the New Forest school in Princess Charming with its fresh air policy or Angela Brazil's Miss Kaye's. Absolutely not the Chalet School, or Kingscote, or The Farm School.

I did almost go to a fictional school in that the one in Evelyn Finds Herself is based on my own. That's cheating though, as it's a day school and on the whole I prefer day school stories as I like the home life mixed in.

What's yours?

Comments

[mimmimmim.livejournal.com]

I haven't read many school books. Pam's First Term was an oddity I was given. (Most of my childhood books were secondhand.)

Pam is born to a colonial couple on an island in the far East, but her mother dies. A sinister local butterfly-worshipping cult sees the toddler as the reincarnation of a golden-haired woman who saved the butterfly god, kidnap her and tattoo (faintly) butterfly wings on her back. Father sends toddler to England, boat sinks, fisherman and wife adopt foundling. Fisherman's wife wisely uses one of the pearls in a pouch around the child's neck to send her to private school as a teenager. Cue cricket, amateur dramatics, bitchy other schoolgirls who don't like the fact that Pam's parents are fishermen and she's nobody at all and a rather topping head girl, plus encounters with sinister 'orientals' who persuade Pam to accompany them back to the island. Her father re-encounters his long-lost daughter, the island blows up and the butterfly worshippers sink into the sea, and it turns out good egg head girl is actually Pam's cousin. Hoorah!

It's all rather absurd, and definitely not PC, but somehow entertaining. I think it was minniemoll who told me it was the only Pam book - and I'd been looking for others for years!

[callmemadam.livejournal.com]

How bizarre. Alys Chatwin was actually a man called Ernest Protheroe!

[mimmimmim.livejournal.com]

That would explain the cricket match against a boys' school and the practical jokes.