What’s the appeal of boarding school stories?

@JoanOgden - I loved Masha so much I had it out of the local library for a year as I just kept renewing it to read again. It was very briefly back in print when DC1 was 10 so I was able to buy it for her. She has read it so many times it has fallen apart.

It is such a good book it needs to be better known.

The problem with the Katy books is that she becomes so annoyingly saintly after her Terrible Accident, under the influence of the ghastly Cousin Helen. The naughty pre accident version would have been more fun to know. I loved the rivers game she invents at her day school, where the girls basically end up trashing their classroom.

If you're writing an essay on it, you should read Rosemsry Auchmuty World of Girls about girls' school stories. Also, Girls Gone By have published (in 3 volumes) the Encyclopaedia of Girls' School Stories.

Don't forget the boys - Tom Brown (which must be one of the first,) Jennings, Billy Bunter, Fifth Form at St Dominic's and Molesworth, among others. (Not sure Molesworth quite fits, but it wouldn't exist if the school story weren't a thing.)

We used to get the Lucozade which came wrapped in cellophane.

Flat 7Up and what was that cure-all cough bottle? Actifed? Phenergan? One of them was so sweet it tasted radioactive.

And there was always a dedicated ‘sick-bowl.’

Agree about Katy’s bedroom, @ClariceQuiff — was it because she’d started off being put to bed upstairs in her own bedroom after the fall, and it was thought it would strain her too much to carry her down?

One thing I never understood was why Katy had to have an upstairs bedroom. Once she was in a self-propelling wheelchair, if she had lived downstairs, she could have gone outside even if it would have been too uncomfortable to go any distance.

I think all children have phases of thinking their lives would be better without their parents (maybe in a not too Freudian way) so boarding school books are a safe way of indulging in this.

I was a shy, lonely child with an unhappy home life so for me they were pure escapism. I have always thought that the best boarding school book was Masha by Mara Kay because of the way she plays out the main character's shyness and isolation against the background of a boarding environment where she is almost never physically alone.

Actually, we probably really need ‘The Secret Diary of Cousin Helen’s Ex- Fiancé’s Wife’, full of mutterings about Little Miss Perfect next door lolling about on her chaise longue looking pretty while some of us dash about worrying about the price of coal and keeping a housemaid and Arthur having his head turned by the hussy at number twenty...

DID YOU FORGET SBOUT ME, MR DUPLICITY?
I HATE TO BUG YOU IN THE MIDDLE OF DINNER
IT WAS A SLAP IN THE FACE,
HOW QUICKLY I WAS REPLACED
AND ARE YOU THINKING OF ME WHEN YOU (HAVE POLITE MARITAL RELATIONS WITH) HER???

I hope she did have a rant and a rave.

Cousin Helen should have taken a lover. Probably wouldn't have been allowed have a man in her room unchaperoned, so she should have found a comely female companion. No one would have suspected a thing...

OMG I have never come across anyone who has heard of The Children Who Lived in a Barn

We used to have a copy at home, it probably went to a charity shop decades ago.

Holiday books such as Swallows and Amazons, Famous Five etc also dump the parents so the children can have adventures on their own. Although with S&A, there usually is a sympathetic parent available in the background if needed.

OMG I have never come across anyone who has heard of The Children Who Lived in a Barn

If was my favourite book and recently bought it (for a King's ransom) to read again. (I'm in my 60s) It is bizarre how those children were allowed to live, but I have never forgotten the hay box.

The latest set of boarding school books (the Ravensbay series by Cressida Burton) that I'm reading has less excitement in the way of kidnappings and foreign princesses, but lots of horses and lots of satisfying petty squabbles between the girls. Also full descriptions of meals and food, always very important. Plus there is a book per term so far which bodes well for the rest of the series.

[quote Erinyes]@TheMerrickBoy, I always suspect Patrick is essentially a posher Jacob Rees-Mogg with ‘golden’ eyes — young fogey, trad Catholic who thinks Vatican II was a vulgarism, rebelling against his peer group with a short back and sides, bigwig dad, homes in London and the country etc. Perhaps the gorgeous blondes next door also fought over a young JRM. [/quote]
A chapel in his actual house.... yes, it all adds up except I can't imagine a saucy French au pair seducing the young JRM. Or wanting to.

Loved Malory Towers and the series on CBBC at the moment is excellent!

@StrychnineInTheSandwiches

omg, *@erinyes*, I had forgotten all the layers of weird!

Like Helen wouldn't be sitting in her bed seething at her faithless lover and the strumpet next door he'd taken up with.

DID YOU FORGET SBOUT ME, MR DUPLICITY?
I HATE TO BUG YOU IN THE MIDDLE OF DINNER
IT WAS A SLAP IN THE FACE,
HOW QUICKLY I WAS REPLACED
AND ARE YOU THINKING OF ME WHEN YOU (HAVE POLITE MARITAL RELATIONS WITH) HER???

And in the mornings, ex-fiancé comes in and says ‘Did you hear any weird singing last night?’ and Cousin Helen smiles angelically and says ‘No, I was in the School of Pain, being taught lessons about sweetness…’

(I also want the real story of Miss Jane and her missionary…)

I'm sure there was a third Enid Blyton boarding school series. Maybe just three books rather than the six each for the original Malory Towers and St Clares series. Does anyone remember them? Perhaps with twins and where they could take their own pets.

The Children Who Lived In A Barn is another story where the parents conveniently disappear (but happily arrive back in the end).

There was one book I read which seemed to have every single boarding school trope in existence - a scholarship girl struggling to fit in, who is kidnapped by “foreign villains” because she was actually adopted after surviving a shipwreck and as a baby was the goddess or something of a remote tribe, and is also somehow revealed to be the long lost cousin of the head girl, I am sure the story also throws in some hidden treasure which when found saves either the school, which would have had to close, or the head girls family, which was in dire straits. I may have just added that from another book though!
Certainly the added peril element was there from the early days though, it is not a new thing.

"Oh, the moral lessons of The School of Pain, and Cousin Helen selflessly releasing her fiancé from their engagement once she had her accident, so he could live next door with the woman he replaced her with and call their child after her — no arguments from me that this is the most sinister of Angel in the House stuff.

The bit about holding your forehead smooth with your fingers so it doesn’t wrinkle unbecomingly when you’re in pain stayed with me! "

There are some interesting articles on literary invalids. I loved the character of Cousin Helen, but in retrospect it's really quite sad. The father calling her a slattern for her unbrushed hair and cluttered medicine bottles, supposedly a turning point for Helen...

After reading books like Elsie Dinsmore, which were blatantly sanctimonious (amongst other things) the Katy books seemed quite mild by comparison!

There was no Calpol in my day @StrychnineInTheSandwiches