Back to school: Irish children’s writers on their favourite school stories

There is a curious thing that happens in classic children’s books. At the start of the school year, students are often strangely excited to get back to school. Even if they’re stubborn and spoiled, they will soon settle in and have lots of fun. Never mind the summer holidays or life at home – school is where it’s at, especially if it’s a boarding school, filled with midnight feasts and pranks on the teachers. School is where adventures happen and friendships are formed – even if it’s not Hogwarts or Earthsea, there’s a certain kind of magic to the school environment.

I asked children’s and young adult writers about their favourite school stories – many of which still hold a special place in their hearts. Here’s what they said…

Deirdre Sullivan

I loved the Four Marys, the Bunty was amazing. I used to root for it in secondhand shops and anywhere we’d visit that had books. I also loved The Twins at St Clare’s. Claudine was my favourite, and as an adult I really enjoy Enid Blyton’s obvious contempt for the French. I was so attracted to the idea of midnight feasts, and honour. I remember one with plagiarism in, where a girl copied a poem from the library to teach a mistress a lesson. She soon learned that it was not okay to do that. When I was actually in school, someone did something very similar with the lyrics of Robbie Williams’s Millennium. And she was a hero, but I was also aware that it wasn’t honourable. Enid Blyton taught me that. And also that just because you love something, it doesn’t mean the person whose brain it came from is perfect.

In this sort of fiction, boarding school is a place where honour, friendship and academic achievement are celebrated. A place free from periods, leg hair and heterosexual romantic competition. You can just be honourable girls, with blazers and badges and slightly different hair in illustrations. Which is the eternal dream.

Deirdre Sullivan’s most recent novel, Needlework, is published by Little Island

Ruth Frances Long

As a kid I was obsessed with the Marmalade Atkins series of books by Andrew Davies. (There was also a TV series). So much so I wanted to be Marmalade. But alas the hair dye and bleach which might have given me the trademark red hair and white stripe were removed from my reach.

Anarchic and hilarious, the story began with Marmalade & Rufus (re-released as Marmalade Atkins’s Dreadful Deeds a few years later), because who doesn’t want to meet a taking donkey whose only goal is to stand on people? The worst girl in the world went to space, got kicked out of every school possible and when faced with one where girls did embroidery and boys played football, guess who picked up her boots and beat them all at their own game? My little proto-feminist self rejoiced.

Ruth Frances Long’s A Darkness at the End, the final part of her European Award winning trilogy from O’Brien Press, is released on September 12th

Judi Curtin

Malory Towers – where do I begin?

After reading these books, I spent all of sixth class begging my parents to send me to boarding school. (Fortunately they were deaf to my pleas.)

Not the best writing in the world, and the moral messages were slapped on with a trowel, but the story and the characters were so wonderful this hardly mattered. Each book is action-packed, and the highs and lows of life in the school by the sea seemed impossibly exotic to a little girl growing up in the suburbs of Cork.

(The joy those books gave me is almost equal to the embarrassment I felt many years later when I discovered that Penelope doesn’t rhyme with antelope, and that Gladys doesn’t sound like two cans of air freshener.)

Judi Curtin’s next novel, Time after Time, will be published by O’Brien Press on September 5th

Sheena Wilkinson

It has to be the Chalet School series by Elinor M Brent-Dyer. With 59 titles between 1925 and 1970, and locations moving from Austria, to Guernsey, England, Wales and Switzerland, the quality varies, but at its best it’s romantic, original but not afraid of confronting reality. I can’t think of many other children’s books published in the 1940s which deal with anti-semitism and concentration camps as honestly as The Chalet School In Exile. Internationalism is the order of the day for chalet girls, and we could do with some of its tolerant, peace-loving spirit today.

Sheena Wilkinson’s most recent novel is Name Upon Name (Little Island), in which she enjoys letting her heroine read the popular school stories of 1916

Shirley-Anne McMillan

I liked the bad girls in school stories. I was never brave enough to be a proper bad girl in school myself. The baddest girl in the school stories I read when I was young was Gwendoline Mary Lacey from Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers.

Malory Towers was a girls-only, Hogwarts-type school – a lovely English boarding school where the pupils played lacrosse, had midnight feasts and tortured their French teacher who was hilarious because of being French.

Gwendoline was the Malfoy. Bad to the bone. She faked a heart condition to get out of her exams and literally almost killed her dad by having a tantrum because he wouldn’t send her to a Swiss finishing school. She was such a terrible person and it was all her mother’s fault for being weak and spoiling her. So really it was her mother’s fault that her dad was on his last legs by the end Gwen’s final year.

Gwendoline’s evil was neatly balanced by the saintly Darrell who saved people’s horses and apologised when her “fiery temper” caused her to lash out (and let’s face it, they probably deserved it anyway). But Gwendoline was why I read the books.”

Shirley-Anne McMillan’s YA novel A Good Hiding was published by Atom in August

For anyone curious, Gwendoline Mary Lacey was redeemed slightly in 2009 when Pamela Cox published several Malory Towers sequels, 58 years after Blyton had finished the series. For tolerance of other (non-British!) cultures, however, it’s best to return to the Chalet School books, many of which have been reissued by specialist publisher Girls Gone By over the past decade.

Claire Hennessy writes, edits and teaches in Dublin