Tales of School Days
Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School
Like many of the best books, this unusual history of an unusual school – St Philip’s prep-school in Kensington, founded in 1934 by Catholic convert Richard Tibbits and still going strong today – is hard to classify. ‘As you live through its story in these chapters,’ the author promises her readers, ‘you’ll be taken on a meander through the twentieth century. War, rationing, smog, mini-skirts, maxi-skirts, strikes, Thatcherism, the first computer . . .’ Enough to say that for anyone who has enjoyed Decline and Fall or St Trinian’s, anyone who loves to laugh yet feels the poignancy of the passage of time, this book will be a treat.
Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Terms & Conditions: Life in Girls’ Boarding-Schools, 1939–1979
‘When I asked a group of girls who had been at Hatherop Castle in the 1960s whether the school had had a lab in those days they gave me a blank look. “A laboratory?” I expanded, hoping to jog their memories. “Oh that kind of lab!” one of them said. “I thought you meant a Labrador.”’ As we discover from this quietly hilarious history of life in British girls’ boarding-schools, this was a not untypical reaction. Harsh matrons, freezing dormitories and appalling food predominated, but occasionally these eccentric establishments imbued in their pupils a lifetime love of the arts and a thirst for self-education. In Terms & Conditions Ysenda speaks to members of a lost tribe – the Boarding-school Women, who look back on their experiences with a mixture of horror and humour.
Roald Dahl, Boy
It’s easy to see from this childhood memoir where the ogres who people Dahl’s fiction come from: the vengeful and filthy-fingernailed sweetshop owner Mrs Pratchett, the school doctor who lances little Ellis’s boil in such a heartless manner, the creepy headmaster of Repton who wields the cane with unacceptable relish. But there’s another, far more cheerful side to the story in the person of Dahl’s adored mother Sofie who, widowed at 35 with six children to care for, nevertheless managed to leave them with idyllic childhood memories. Like many individualists, Dahl never fitted in at school and was ecstatic when he finally escaped to work for Shell, setting off for East Africa with the same infectious bounce and enthusiasm that permeate this irresistible little book.
Richard Cobb, A Classical Education
Everything about the historian Richard Cobb was unexpected and original, especially his writing. A Classical Education is no exception, a memoir that’s more like a psychological thriller, told in Cobb’s exquisite and inimitable style. Cobb and his friend Edward (surname withheld) were given the ‘classical education’ of the title at their public school, Shrewsbury, where they became friendly enough to visit one another’s homes in the holidays. But whereas Cobb came from an exemplarily safe and conventional middle-class family, Edward’s was entirely the reverse. Enough to say that his nicknames for his parents were Moloch and Medea. The result was a shocking event, on which Cobb looks back with wonder and dismay when he meets Edward again fourteen years later. A Classical Education is a book you won’t be able to put down.
Water Pistols at Fifty Paces
The year was 1934, and Richard (‘Dick’) Tibbits, it seems, had been approached by Father Talbot of the Brompton Oratory with the suggestion that there was need for a Catholic boys’ prep school...
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Read moreHands off the Handlebars
Throughout his work – James and the Giant Peach (1961), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), Fantastic Mr Fox (1970), Danny, The Champion of the World (1975), The Twits (1980), The BFG (1982)...
Read moreAn Unusual Case
Richard Cobb’s memoir A Classical Education (1985) opens on a spring day in 1950. He is at St Lazare station in Paris awaiting the arrival of an old schoolfriend he’s not seen for fourteen years....
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