Latest news with #AnthonyBuckeridge
The Guardian
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Clare Chambers: ‘Iris Murdoch taught me that a novel could be about absolutely anything'
My earliest reading memory I have the fuzziest memory of an illustrated Grimms' fairy tale called Jorinde and Joringel from the time before I could read. I made my mum take it out of the library over and over again. It was about a quest for a flower with some special powers. I wish I could remember why it had such a hold over me. My favourite book growing up I think a sense of humour is forged in childhood and I remember crying with laughter as my older sister read me the Jennings books by Anthony Buckeridge. It didn't bother me that they were all about prep school boys – it was the comedy of embarrassment that really spoke to me. The book that changed me as a teenager I grew up during the Thatcher years. The brutal hardship of the life of 19th-century coal miners in Émile Zola's Germinal, which I read when I'd just left school, rattled me out of my comfortable middle-class certainties in a way that the social injustices happening under my nose had failed to do. That's the power of fiction. The book that made me want to be a writer I think I always wanted to be a writer, but The Bell by Iris Murdoch, about a lay religious community whose peaceful, unworldly exterior hides turbulent and destructive forces, was a landmark in my reading. I read it at 16 and it was perhaps the first time I realised that a novel, if perfectly executed, could be about absolutely anything. The book I came back to I first read Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway at university and found the constant shifting from one consciousness to another infuriating and tedious. I tried it again in my 50s, closer to the age of Clarissa Dalloway herself, and this time the ripples of thoughts and impressions and the intrusion of the past into the present made much more sense. Maybe in another 40 years I will find something to admire in The Waves. The book I reread When I was young, Persuasion was my least favourite Austen novel. It was too slow, too melancholy, its hero and heroine too lacking in charisma. Each time I've reread it since it moves up the rankings. It doesn't have the dazzle of Pride and Prejudice, but I have grown into its autumnal tone of regret for lost time. The book I could never read again I read Le Grand Meaulnes at 17 and thought it must have been written especially for me. Alain-Fournier's early death on the Somme only added to its tragic allure. It's a young person's book, full of romance and yearning, and should not be revisited in cynical middle age. I tried and soon regretted it – 'the lost domain' was well and truly lost. The book I discovered later in life I was in my 50s when I first read Anthony Trollope. I don't know what took me so long as his novels have all the elements I enjoy – psychological acuity, plot, moral dilemmas, wit, social commentary. My favourite is The Small House at Allington. Lily Dale is a delightful heroine in the Lizzie Bennet mould, but Trollope sets up the traditional good suitor/bad suitor predicament and then drives an elegant carriage and horses through our assumptions. I should add that Timothy West's masterful performances of the unabridged audiobooks take the reading experience to an even higher level. The book I am currently readingNow We Shall Be Entirely Free by Andrew Miller. I'm ashamed to say I had not read any of his books until The Land in Winter, which made me urgently seek out his earlier work. It's that rarest of treats – propulsive storytelling in sensuous prose. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion My comfort read I find comfort in even the darkest book if the writing is brilliant, but for the quiet dignity of ordinary lives I turn to The Fortnight in September by RC Sherriff. Shy Creatures by Clare Chambers is out in paperback from W&N. To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Yahoo
29-03-2025
- General
- Yahoo
When single sex schools die, we will all be poorer
I didn't go to boarding school, but some small part of me feels as if I did because my inner life was vividly informed by books that supplied the requisite details: tuck boxes, luggage labels, dormitories, matrons, sanitoriums and exeats. Our family bookshelves heaved with Enid Blyton's Malory Towers, Anthony Buckeridge's Jennings series and, most blissful of all, Geoffrey Willans' Molesworth escapades and Ronald Searle's St Trinian's volumes. Even when my reading wasn't directly concerned with the single-sex boarding experience, girls and boys in children's literature were inevitably travelling home, or to stay with a guardian (the staple rule in children's books dictating that parents must be removed to make adventure possible), with initialled metal trunks, ready to let off steam. So seductive were these books that, aged 10, I idly daydreamed about being banished to a remote, cliff-top ladies' college. Or, better still, toiling as the school's maid after my father died, having lost his fortune investing in a friend's diamond mine, like Sara in Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess. But I can't help wondering how the shelves of children will look in 20 years after all the upheavals in the private education sector. Surely the subject of single-sex boarding schools will be firmly relegated to the realms of fantasy, if it informs literature at all. This week The Telegraph revealed that Labour's imposition of VAT on school fees has had a particularly brutal effect on single-sex independent schools, which are closing or going co-ed at a rate of knots. Once boys public schools littered the land, including many ropey ones (think of Evelyn Waugh's Pennyfeather in Decline and Fall, teaching at Llanabba Castle School). Now there are only four all-boys boarding schools left in the UK: Eton, Harrow, Radley and Tonbridge. Meanwhile, all girls establishments are racing to take boys, despite studies showing girls do best when educated separately. Not only will children's shelves be changed by the upheaval, adult literature will be transformed too. So many books I've loved unlock British history and our national temperament – in particular our stiff upper-lip and fortitude – by taking an unsentimental look at boarding school life. Jane Eyre wouldn't linger long in the imagination had she not triumphed over the hideous deprivations she endured at Lowood School. Logan Mountstuart in William Boyd's Any Human Heart has a life underpinned by the friendships and rivalries he establishes at public school. More chilling, is Sebastian Faulks' fine novel Engleby, where the working-class anti-hero is at an 'ancient university', after winning a scholarship to Chatfield, a public school for the sons of naval officers. During his schooldays he was hideously bullied and called 'Toilet Engleby' for the heinous crime of not saying 'lavatory', like his posher classmates. If you think that sounds off-putting, then I can only say that literary memoirs like Charles Spencer's A Very Private Education and Antonia White's Frost in May are darker still. But they're also beautifully-written, salutary reminders that a late 20th-century revolution in the field of child psychology served to revolutionise private education, introducing the previously alien concept of wellbeing. Not all boarding-school lit is grim. Look at James Hilton's Goodbye Mr Chips, a tear-jerking love letter to the finest teachers, while many women would kill to take refuge from modern life at Angela Brazil's St Chad's. The sad fact is these time-honoured avenues of escapism will slowly disappear, along with the schools themselves. Future generations, schooled by AI, will never know the worlds of nuance summoned by the phrase 'chizz chizz'. It will all be another country. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
29-03-2025
- General
- Telegraph
When single sex schools die, we will all be poorer
I didn't go to boarding school, but some small part of me feels as if I did because my inner life was vividly informed by books that supplied the requisite details: tuck boxes, luggage labels, dormitories, matrons, sanitoriums and exeats. Our family bookshelves heaved with Enid Blyton's Malory Towers, Anthony Buckeridge's Jennings series and, most blissful of all, Geoffrey Willans' Molesworth escapades and Ronald Searle's St Trinian's volumes. Even when my reading wasn't directly concerned with the single-sex boarding experience, girls and boys in children's literature were inevitably travelling home, or to stay with a guardian (the staple rule in children's books dictating that parents must be removed to make adventure possible), with initialled metal trunks, ready to let off steam. So seductive were these books that, aged 10, I idly daydreamed about being banished to a remote, cliff-top ladies' college. Or, better still, toiling as the school's maid after my father died, having lost his fortune investing in a friend's diamond mine, like Sara in Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess. But I can't help wondering how the shelves of children will look in 20 years after all the upheavals in the private education sector. Surely the subject of single-sex boarding schools will be firmly relegated to the realms of fantasy, if it informs literature at all. This week The Telegraph revealed that Labour's imposition of VAT on school fees has had a particularly brutal effect on single-sex independent schools, which are closing or going co-ed at a rate of knots. Once boys public schools littered the land, including many ropey ones (think of Evelyn Waugh's Pennyfeather in Decline and Fall, teaching at Llanabba Castle School). Now there are only four all-boys boarding schools left in the UK: Eton, Harrow, Radley and Tonbridge. Meanwhile, all girls establishments are racing to take boys, despite studies showing girls do best when educated separately. Not only will children's shelves be changed by the upheaval, adult literature will be transformed too. So many books I've loved unlock British history and our national temperament – in particular our stiff upper-lip and fortitude – by taking an unsentimental look at boarding school life. Jane Eyre wouldn't linger long in the imagination had she not triumphed over the hideous deprivations she endured at Lowood School. Logan Mountstuart in William Boyd's Any Human Heart has a life underpinned by the friendships and rivalries he establishes at public school. More chilling, is Sebastian Faulks' fine novel Engleby, where the working-class anti-hero is at an 'ancient university', after winning a scholarship to Chatfield, a public school for the sons of naval officers. During his schooldays he was hideously bullied and called 'Toilet Engleby' for the heinous crime of not saying 'lavatory', like his posher classmates. If you think that sounds off-putting, then I can only say that literary memoirs like Charles Spencer's A Very Private Education and Antonia White's Frost in May are darker still. But they're also beautifully-written, salutary reminders that a late 20th-century revolution in the field of child psychology served to revolutionise private education, introducing the previously alien concept of wellbeing. Not all boarding-school lit is grim. Look at James Hilton's Goodbye Mr Chips, a tear-jerking love letter to the finest teachers, while many women would kill to take refuge from modern life at Angela Brazil's St Chad's. The sad fact is these time-honoured avenues of escapism will slowly disappear, along with the schools themselves. Future generations, schooled by AI, will never know the worlds of nuance summoned by the phrase 'chizz chizz'. It will all be another country.
