wot i red on my hols by alan robson (omne bonum ab alto)

School and Other Things

In the middle years of the twentieth century books by Enid Blyton were everywhere you looked. They overflowed the shelves of bookshops and libraries. They were read avidly by children of all ages from tiny tots to teens – Enid Blyton was a canny businesswoman, not only was she a frighteningly prolific writer, she also made very sure to cover a vast spectrum of reading ability and interests so as to maximise her market penetration, if I may use a phrase that she would have abhorred for its business-speak ugliness.

But as the twentieth century progressed she began to fall more and more out of favour. Her books disappeared from the shelves. Bookshops no longer stocked them and libraries refused to admit that they had any Enid Blyton books hidden away in the stacks. You couldn’t even get them in a plain brown dust cover. Pornography was much easier to find than were Enid Blyton books.

Enid Blyton was perhaps the first (and certainly the most famous) victim of the censorship that was part and parcel of what came to be called a "politically correct" era that brought with it its own very puritanical and unforgiving views concerning what was right and what was wrong. Blyton was accused of racism (golliwogs!), xenophobia (foreigners in her books are invariably portrayed as swarthy, untrustworthy and villainous), and sexism (boys hold girls in contempt and girls look up to and admire the boys). All these charges are true in the sense that those attitudes certainly exist in her stories, but the reality is a little bit more complex and much more nuanced than the rather simple-minded criticisms that are usually brought to bear on her work would suggest.

It is relatively easy to find counter-examples – consider, for example, the character of George (Georgina) in the Famous Five novels. These days we’d think of George as being trans-gender, but Enid Blyton did not have words like that in her vocabulary (they hadn’t been invented yet) so she simply describes George as a tomboy. All the characters in the novels just accept George for who they are. Blyton didn’t have access to flexible pronouns yet either, and so always refers to George as she. Shrug! On more than one occasion George’s attitudes, beliefs and abilities are absolutely vital to the working out of the plot. All of this means that there is clearly a lot more going on here than our politically correct moral guardians would have us believe. Like Walt Whitman before her, Enid Blyton was contradictory, large and contained multitudes.

These days Enid Blyton is coming back into fashion and her books are now relatively easy to find though some, unfortunately, have been rather viciously bowdlerised. Noddy books abound, but the golliwogs have vanished from their pages. Boo! Hiss!

Perhaps the ultimate evidence of Enid Blyton’s rehabilitation is the fact that the BBC have produced a superb dramatisation of her Malory Towers novels. So far, 74 episodes have been broadcast, split across five seasons. A further 20 episodes spread across two more seasons are currently in production. The stories take place in the late 1940s and early 1950s. They follow the adventures of 12-year-old Darrell Rivers as she leaves home to attend an all-girls' boarding school, the eponymous Malory Towers itself. As you might expect, the stories are chock-a-block with midnight feasts, games of lacrosse, practical jokes and pranks, a mystery ghost, buried treasure, secret passages, hidden rooms and, most important of all, the forging of lasting, life-long friendships. I absolutely loved it.

I never read the books when I was a child because they were books written for and written about girls. Boys didn’t read books like that in those days. It simply wasn’t done. It might even have been against the law… But because the TV series was so utterly brilliant, and because nowadays I am nowhere near that prejudiced any more, I determined to read them and I’m very glad I did. They are ripping yarns, full of wit and humour, drama, triumph and with just a little bit of tragedy now and then to add some spice to the mix. In short, they are bloody good stories.

Enid Blyton was building upon a venerable British tradition going back for more than a century when she wrote her Malory Towers books. Generations of British children had grown up reading stories set in schools – Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Eric or Little by Little, Stalky and Co., what seemed like millions of Billy Bunter books, and goodness knows how many Jennings and Darbyshire novels. The list was, and still is, endless and growing. Harry Potter’s adventures at Hogwarts are just the latest instalments. They won’t be the last.

As an aside, I remember reading Eric or Little by Little when I myself was quite little and being struck by the number of tragic deaths occurring in it. Children didn’t die at school, did they? School was supposed to be a safe place. I found the idea quite upsetting. Later in life, when I was in my early teens, reality caught up with me when two of my own school friends died – one was killed in a traffic accident and one choked to death on his own vomit after running too hard, too fast and too far. That was when I realised that, melodramatic though it may have been, Eric or Little by Little had contained a kernel of truth within its deeply gloomy pages.

Fortunately the Malory Towers books are nowhere near as dark. They are full of light and life and joie de vivre. They are also prime examples of the British class system at work. Malory Towers is an exclusive boarding school for girls. Its fees are eye wateringly expensive and so only the children of the rich (i.e. upper-middle and upper class girls) are able to attend – though the occasional scholarship girl does turn up every now and then in order to at least pay lip service to the spirit of socialism that defined the middle decades of the twentieth century in Britain.

Because Malory Towers is what it is, and because the class system is what it is, snobbery is rife among the girls though they themselves completely fail to recognise it because they have grown up surrounded by it all their life long, For them, it is the very definition of normality. That way of looking at the world presents some rather deep philosophical conundrums (conundra?) for the readers of the books to think about. For example, in one novel much thought is given to the preparation of a sixth former who is about to be presented at court as one of the season’s first débutantes. It’s all very jolly hockey sticks (or perhaps I should say jolly lacrosse sticks, since hockey is not played at Malory Towers). For the pupils, having to prepare to come out in the season is just one of the ordinary, everyday things that one does when the proper time arrives. But it’s something completely foreign to the experiences of the vast majority of the mostly middle class and working class children who (presumably) make up the books’ intended audience. What’s a season? What’s a débutante? And of course by the time the novels were rehabilitated and republished in the twenty-first century, débutantes had long since vanished from the social calendar of high society anyway, which makes the attitudes expressed in the stories even more of a quaint mystery. How is a reader supposed to identify with something so outré?

But none of that matters. The stories just carry you on simply because they are so damned entertaining.

The TV series is beautifully produced and brilliantly acted and the screenplays stick very closely to both the spirit and the letter of the plots of the novels. Occasional tweaks are made here and there for dramatic purposes, but that’s always the case when books are translated into dramas for the screen. The show does however make one very curious and major concession to modern sensibilities – the staff and pupils are a motley mixture of many different ethnicities…

At the time in which the stories are set there was a large influx of immigration into Britain from the West Indies. It could have been an interesting experiment to present the black pupils at Malory Towers as being the children of these immigrants. How would such a mixture of ethnicities (and classes) have affected the attitudes of the pupils at Malory Towers? Would the refectory have to start serving Jamaican food? But actually nothing whatsoever is made of this ethnic and cultural mixture because, of course, none of it is ever mentioned in the books, not even in passing, and therefore introducing it into the television show would smack faintly of lèse-majesté. As a consequence all the staff and all the students, regardless of their ethnicity, are portrayed as stolid members of the British upper class, Sloane Rangers the lot of them. It’s just that some of them have a slightly differently coloured skin. But every single one of them, regardless of their ethnicity, is utterly British through and through. It all feels slightly odd and more than a little unsettling, not to say surreal.

Almost everybody talks with the cut glass received pronunciation accents that are the hallmark of the British upper classes. The actors speak it brilliantly well, so much so that at the end of every episode I felt compelled to check the television set in case the dialogue had etched itself into the screen. Fortunately it never did, but I’m sure it must have been a close run thing. That accent can shatter wine glasses at twenty paces.

Only one pupil has a different accent – Alicia is Canadian and has a very sweet and soft Canadian accent. The other girls quickly accept her for who and what she is and they all become fast friends with her. After all, she’s just a colonial. She can’t be expected to know any better.

Actually, her presence at the school almost certainly has a rather more pragmatic reason behind it – the TV series was a joint production between the BBC and a Canadian television service so Alicia’s presence at Malory Towers was probably a contractual obligation. But who cares? She plays her part to perfection and definitely adds some delightfully delicious humour to the scenes she appears in.

There was only one aspect of the television show that I didn’t like – none of the pupils at Malory Towers knew how to hold a pen, and watching them sitting at their desks attempting to write essays or take notes was excruciatingly painful. I almost had to close my eyes when those scenes appeared before me.

Like the pupils at Malory Towers, I was at school in the 1950s, though my school was much less exclusive than theirs. Penmanship was a skill that we had drummed into us from a very early age. We had lessons on how to hold a pen properly so that we could write all day long with no sense of strain. There were no computers in those days, and typewriters were rare and expensive devices reserved exclusively for secretaries. All we had were pens and paper. To this day I can sit down with a pen and a notepad and scribble away quite happily for hours at a time.

Unfortunately this is a skill that is starting to vanish from the world. The ubiquity of keyboards of one sort and another means that these days it is seldom necessary for anyone to write anything down on paper. Consequently lessons in how to hold and use a pen have vanished from the school curriculum. On the rare occasions when something does need to be written down (perhaps the scribing of a name onto a cup in a coffee shop, for example) the contortions that the writers’ fingers make around the pen / pencil / felt tip are astounding in their variety and their clumsiness. Nobody who holds a pen like that would ever be able to write more than a sentence or so before their hand would cramp up and fall off. And, of course, in real life the actors in Malory Towers are all twenty-first century children who have probably never written a word in their life before. So it’s not surprising that they don’t know how to hold the pens that they have to act with. Why didn’t their acting coaches teach them how to hold their pens properly? Probably because they too have no idea how to hold and use a pen. It has been several generations since it was a required skill and consequently nowadays it is a skill that is pretty much non-existent.

All of that probably means that I’m just an old curmudgeon waving my walking stick and shouting at a world that isn’t listening to me. So pay me no attention. Just go and read the books and watch the television series. Both are brilliant, and both will greatly reward the time that you spend with them.

* * * *

Faye Kellerman writes wonderful detective novels. However from my point of view (though not from hers) they are more than a little odd. From the outset it is important to understand that Faye Kellerman herself is a practising, orthodox Jew. Her faith is the central core of who she is. It guides and illuminates everything she thinks and does. So it’s not very surprising to find that her novels revolve around everyday life in America’s Jewish community. I have no idea to what extent her novels are autobiographical, but it is quite clear that she is doing what every writer is always urged to do, she is writing about what she knows.

For me, reading her books felt rather like reading an SF story in which aliens do incomprehensible things for reasons that they themselves find convincing but which make no sense whatsoever to the Earth people who are trying to understand them. It added an interesting dimension to a fairly standard detective story and I found the whole experience quite fascinating.

The Ritual Bath is the first book in a long series about a detective called Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus, who is the love of his life. The novel is, to use a bit of jargon more usually found in discussions of movies, their origin story…

The story begins when Peter receives a report of a beating and rape that has taken place in a remote and mostly self-contained Jewish community high in the California hills. The woman had been attacked as she was returning home from the mikvah, the bathhouse where a ritual cleansing is performed after a woman has had her period. Following her period, a woman is not allowed to have sex with her husband for twelve days. At the end of that time she must purify herself with a bath in the mikvah. Rina been supervising the bathing ritual of a friend and had stayed behind to clean the bathhouse afterwards. She discovered the victim, bruised and beaten, as she left the mikvah to return home and immediately reported the crime to the police.

Decker finds her to be a calm and intelligent witness. She is also the only person in this sheltered community who is willing to speak freely to him about what the rest of the community perceive to be an unspeakable violation. Even the victim herself refuses to discuss it.

Rina takes it upon herself to try and explain this riddle to Decker. She takes him through the maze of religious laws and ceremonies that govern the community’s everyday life and delves deeply into the reasons why everybody considers them to be so important. By the end of the book, the two of them have fallen very much in love with each other. Decker is divorced and Rina is a widow so, on the surface at least, there seems to be nothing preventing them from taking their relationship further.  But it is a relationship that is doomed never to come to fruition because those self same laws and customs that define, describe and circumscribe Rina’s life forbid anything other than the most casual of friendships between them.

Given that the series now has more than twenty books in it, and given that each one of them is billed as a Decker and Lazarus novel, it seems clear to me that there must be a loophole somewhere in those intractable Jewish laws…

The second novel, Sacred and Profane, takes place several months after the events of the first book. Peter and Rina have grown very, very close to each other and Peter has revealed that although he was brought up as a baptist, his biological parents were actually Jewish. For all the usual kinds of reasons they had to put him up for adoption when he was born and so he was raised by a loving, Christian family. However because of his Jewish roots, it is possible that he can come in from the cold. He starts to study the Torah under the tutelage of Rina’s own rabbi.

I told you there was a loophole!

Peter has taken Rina’s two sons on a camping trip. On the last day of their vacation one of the boys stumbles across two human skeletons. Forensic examination of the bones reveals them to be those of two teenage girls. The story soon becomes very dark indeed as Decker finds himself embroiled in a complex plot involving child prostitution, paedophilic pornographic movies and ultimately snuff films, the sale of which is making a lot of money for some very unscrupulous people.

As if he didn’t have enough problems to contend with, Decker is also finding it hard to come to grips with his studies of the Torah. He’s not necessarily having theological doubts (though that is certainly part of it), he’s just struggling with what he perceives to be the essential arbitrariness of it all. The only thing keeping him going is his love for Rina, but even that is increasingly coming under a strain and for much of the novel they are estranged, living separate lives and feeling quite miserable about it as a result. At one point Decker even contemplates having an affair with the forensic scientist who identified the dead girls and who has been flirting outrageously with him from the moment they met. Fortunately for his future relationship with Rina, he puts the temptation behind him and by the end of the novel the two of them are somewhat reconciled.

In terms of its subject matter, this is one of the nastiest novels I’ve ever read – Faye Kellerman pulls no punches in her descriptions of the exploitation of children. Her insights into the motives of the people who indulge themselves in these kinds of things are both fascinating and repulsive at one and the same time. You will need a very strong stomach indeed to read this book but if you persevere it will repay dividends. I won’t claim that it has a happy ending, except in the sense that its tribulations serve to strengthen Decker’s understanding of the way that Rina sees the world, but I will claim that as an examination of the dark corners of human behaviour it is second to none.

Faye Kellerman’s novels do not make for light reading. They are psychologically and theologically very dense (though they do have the occasional joke to lighten the mood). If nothing else, I came out of them knowing a lot more about Judaism than I had known when I started reading them. No knowledge is ever wasted.