November 2012: Anthony Buckeridge's "Jennings' Little Hut" and our December book

Fossilised fish-hooks!  We went back to 1951 this month to spend some time at Linbury Court Preparatory School with JCT Jennings, his friend CEJ Darbishire and 77 other well-brought-up but excitable small boys, and to laugh at their adventures in Anthony Buckeridge's Jennings' Little Hut: building dens, exercising a goldfish in the school pool, smashing the Archbeako's cucumber frame with a wayward cricket ball, and generally getting into scrapes.


Born in 1912, Anthony Buckeridge was a schoolmaster in a prep school in Sussex in the 1940s when he began to invent tales about a boy called Jennings.  Like Joan Aiken, whose stories were first heard on Children's Hour in 1941, Buckeridge submitted a  script to the BBC about the well-meaning but hare-brained little boy, and between 1948 and 1962 Jennings and his perpetually ten-year old schoolfriends were Children's Hour favourites.  The first book, Jennings Goes to School, appeared in 1950 and a further 24 titles followed over the next 45 years.  Buckeridge died in 2004, aged 92.

It seemed we either loved Jennings or were  baffled by him.  Those of us who had fallen in love with Linbury Court as children were not disappointed by returning.  Those for whom it was their first visit found the book harder to enjoy, and somewhat  anachronistic.  The first chapter, devoted to the technicalities of hut building, proved difficult to overcome; the complexities of cricket - so vital to all boys' school stories - was also something of a turn-off.  But everyone loved the unique language: particularly the boys' specialised vocabulary of complaint and exclamation - everything being 'ozard', 'wizard' or 'supersonic',  accompanied by imprecations to 'ankle round', 'hoof off' or 'fox round', while the teachers were either 'heading this way at forty knots' or 'taking off on a roof level attack'.
We explored the differences between the girls' school stories of Enid Blyton's Malory Towers with its bullying spitefulness, and Buckeridge's Linbury Court with its focus on the boys' comic high spirits and well-intentioned schemes, and where everyone seemed to be liked by their peers - even 'clodpoll' Darbishire, the 'newt-brained shrimp wit' who is rubbish at games and tends to quote his father - a vicar - and Tennyson rather too often.  We compared Jennings with that other 1950's schoolboy of repute, the satirical Nigel Molesworth of St Custard's, the male equivalent of Geoffrey Willans' other school series, St Trinian's.  Molesworth seems just that bit more street-wise and appealing, with his 'history started badly and hav been geting steadily worse' attitude and his sketchy approach to 'speling', while St Custard's is more anarchically terrifying than gentle Linbury Court, ruled as it is with an iron fist by Headmaster Grimes (BA, Stoke on Trent),  constantly in search of cash to supplement his income and who runs a whelk stall part-time.
We discussed the powerful literary heritage of 19th and early 20th century boys' public school stories, and the imprinting of their ethos, language and experiences on subsequent generations, as evidenced by books such as Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown's School Days (1857), Frank Richards' Billy Bunter and others - right up to today with Harry Potter and Hogwart's school (a name which first appeared in the Molesworth books as the rival school to St Custard's).  We looked at some examples of the genre from Bath Library's archive of historic children's books, including a copy of A Toast Fag (1901) by Harold Avery, which had been presented as a prize in 1911 to a child at South Oldfield Junior School - far removed from Eton, Harrow and Rugby.  We ended by briefly discussing the influence of P G Wodehouse, who was Anthony Buckeridge's favourite author.
We are staying in the 1950s next month to read The Children of Green Knowe by Lucy Boston (1954) and will meet again on Wednesday 5 December 2012 at 1015.

October 2012: Joan Aiken's "Midnight is a Place" and our November book

We journeyed back into some unspecified time and location this month when we opened the covers of Joan Aiken's 1974 classic, Midnight is a Place.  With grotesque characters,  a bleak and snowy countryside, a pair of ragged orphans - and a grimy mill town with an extraordinarily high workplace accident rate - it was redolent with parodic echoes of Charles Dickens and Mrs Gaskell at their most melodramatic.  It's reminiscent too of The Secret Garden and Jane Eyre.  While we winced at the author's use of "oop north" dialect to distinguish the workers from the gentry, the Boz-like illustrations by Pat Marriott added to the illusion of being somewhere in Victorian industrial England, most likely beyond the Watford Gap ... 

Born in 1924, Aiken was the daughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Conrad Aiken and the step-daughter of novelist and poet Martin Armstrong. Home-educated between the wars on a diet of much Victorian literature and early 20th century writing, her heritage is unmistakeable.  This is a quirky book, stuffed with inventive and memorable imagery, and fascinating ideas that appeal to children and adults alike.  

Those who had read Midnight is a Place when they were younger recalled most vividly the scenes in the carpet factory: particularly the enormous press thundering terrifyingly down from the roof to squash any little clot snatcher too slow to get out of the way.  As adults, we were each struck by any number of tiny and imaginative details: Handel's tuning fork, a grandmother living in a Georgian ice-house, loaves of bread baked with chestnut flour, the red coat, a mediaeval jewelled saddle fished out of the sewers, the Friendly Society that's anything but ...

Aiken's beautifully observed young hero, Lucas, sets out the central thesis in his schoolroom essay in the opening pages: "Industry is a good thing because it is better to work in a carpet factory than to be out in the rain with nothing to eat".  He then spends the rest of the book discovering the truth about this middle-class perspective on the lot of the poor.  Thrown together with the fiercely independent young French girl, Anna-Marie, and then abandoned to their own devices, the children are subjected to a series of trials and hardships so monumentally awful, in a winter so cold and dreadful, that you just long for the first sign of spring to bring some relief!  There's surprising tragedy too, including a ghastly and unexpected fight to the death with a piece of industrial equipment.

One interesting theme in Midnight is a Place is that of the role of the music teacher being used as a device to cross the divide between the gentry and the working classes.  We think this may occur in other books too - we just need to confirm this with a few examples.

Finally, the consensus was that (although the story was initially hard to get into) most of us were "gripped without loving it".  Almost too darkly melodramatic - rainswept, snowy, cold and filthy - and with any number of convenient plot twists advancing to a rapid conclusion, Midnight is a Place has just a slight tinge of a Victoria Wood Christmas Special.

Next month we're off to a boys' prep school when we're reviewing Jennings' Little Hut by Anthony Buckeridge (1951).  Supersonic!