Fur limed reading

 I did get the second Valerie Hastings piece of classic G.O (Girls Only)  fiction in a 1968 hard back edition

You know all about me and G.O fiction, the stuff I read at school, especially boarding school so I was super pleased about that.

It's really about the strange goings on at Hazelmere, Jill's boarding school where it transpires an arts competition is being used to smuggle out two stolen works of art from a local art collector and the perils for Penny Maxwell of having her Mum on the school's governing body interfering  in the Fourth Forms lessons like the music lessons topics and the Horse Riding plus wanting to fix things for Penny where this will only undermine the sense of fairness seen by the remainder of the form.

I don't think I mentioned for a good while I do have a number of Angela Brazil's masterpieces of the genre in Armada paperbacks, the copies I had living as a child (well we can't truthfully say growing up!)

I wrote about this several years back , a gripping tale of intrigue, inheritance and the lives of schoolgirls and recently re-read it.

I did mention about having some things at Christmas  and these were the fleecy booty slippers I had from Mummy which are a snug fit being UK size three through five  and I'm a five having relatively small feet and small paws too!

They're not to be honest big in support like a traditional plimsoll type usually is which is what I was brought up with but they are as warm as toast once on you.

Paddington Bear & The school at the turrets

Today's theme is reading and today I will write about two books.

One thing I have always liked is Paddington Bear who came from deepest darkest Peru to London.

Aunt Lucy is Paddington's aunt and Uncle Pastuzo's wife. She adopted her nephew after his parents died. When Pastuzo died in an earthquake she later sent him off to London while she resided in the Home for Retired Bears in Darkest Peru. 

Paddington often writes to her about his new family in London.

Paddington Bear was both a series of printed stories we read and at the time a cartoon series on BBC 1, part of a batch that run before the main 5:40 or 5:45 evening news slot that marked the transition from children's programming to more adult or  at least whole family material.

I have a dvd with all the original cartoon episodes on.

Connected with Michael Bond being working in the BBC, for a good many years in the 1960's and early 1970's a new Paddington Bear short story would appear in the Blue Peter book we had that Christmas.

This publication, mine is a the original boyhood edition, issued in 1975 brought a group of them together 

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As the nights start to draw in, it's a enjoyable idea to read a book about an hour before bed time several chapters per night and this is one I read recently.

 I've had this actual childhood being published in nineteen seventy-one by Armada in Great Britain and my copy is a little worn around the spine although the pages haven't started to fall out.

It's a ghost story with a twist being set at a girls boarding school where Ida sees something that almost causes her heart to stop beating for her eyes are transfixed upon a tall figure in white with an outstretched hand and a stony stare in her eyes.

This, Ida thinks must be the the 'White Lady' who legend has it haunts the old part of the school turrets.

It's a gripping story.

The Youngest Girl in the Fifth

Seeing Christmas  and New year is out of the way, here's the latest installment of a series of short bits on the stories I read at boarding school and this edition dates to 1970 and isn't in quiet so good a condition as the others apart from having the price in the old UK money that was changed February 1971.

I still have floating around my conversion device for old and new currencies I had as a young child.

The story is is set at an all girls boarding school where fourteen and a bit Gwen Gascoyne, is moved in the middle of the term from the Upper Fourth to the Fifth Form as her Principal, Miss Roscoe feels the work in the Upper Fourth is too easy despite her years.

In the World of the school girls she is seen as stand-offish, treated very much as an outcast by all except Netta whose malicious scheming nature leads Gwen into trouble and deceit.
All of this isn't helped by a spell of bad luck either!

Gwen comes into her own during an accident during an accident in her forms geology expedition and from then on begins to earn the respect of her classmates.

I always found Geology interesting as a child.

Three terms at Uplands

The theme in a way of this post might as well be "You're always a gurl" no least for the things that remain from that period not least the story books I still have of which this 1970 copy is an original.

I don't know about you but there always was one child in the form who it always seemed  to be the one who in trouble, not that I was angelic, and this book is about a girl, Claire Johnstone, who is although as in my experience too there is real trouble-maker behind  it all, in this case Ethel, who just leaves poor old Claire to take the blame.

Claire is fortunate to get a scholarship to Uplands, a large boarding school who sees this a chance to start anew with a clean slate until she finds there is a another new girl -Ethel!

It isn't long before Claire is back in trouble again all because Ethel thinks the Juniors are getting a raw deal from the Prefects.

We had Head Girls and Boys but basically you had certain amount power over your fellow pupils as Prefect and extra duties which didn't always go down so well with folk.

Anyway, Ethel wants Pupil Power and the Juniors soon find themselves members of Ethel's Students Union, an action anywhere in a school I went of putting you on the wrong side of Adult Authority, rebelling.

A Princess at the School & The Manor House School

As you may of gathered I do rather like reading and these are two books I've had since childhood.

These are editions from 1970 although they were reprinted by Armada across that decade as I read them at boarding school during that era.

The Manor House School is about a Eleven and Twelve year old girls Cicely and Lindsay who arrive in the Summer Term who find a secret room, hear some voices which leads to a mystery involving a missing fortune which leads them to discover the mystery of Winterburn Manor.

The Princess at the School (originally of the school), written in 1920, is a story of Ingleton children who having been orphaned and their home, Cheverley Chase, has been left to a young cousin who nobody seems to have been met.

Upon meeting cousin Carmel, the children make it plain she isn't welcome but her friendly nature eventually wins them over so while  they lost their original home it seems they've found a new friend.

Stories like that always were a part of my life I enjoyed and while having kept them, I do enjoy revisiting them from time to time.

The Head Girl at the Gables & What Katy Did

Part of this whole adult still  a child side of me involves reading  often things about or even from  my childhood so today I'm looking at some books I read back then.

It's a story about a girl called Lorraine who wasn't thought of being Head Girl material by all her peers at The Gables, their school being rather quiet and withdrawn, scarcely one of the schools personalities.

The Headmistress, Miss Kingsley has altogether different thoughts so she's appointed but from the get go, a hard struggle for Lorraine to win the girls over begins. 

She decides to organize a School Show, finding a new ally in artistically minded Claudia, taking command in a most surprising effective way.

She finds a newly discovered talent for painting as part of her school life which leads to the unmasking of a dangerous spy ring. 

The What Katy Did trilogy  by Susan Coolidge a I originally read but never owned as a child having more of Enid Blyton's novels but a good few years back I bought the 1989 World Distributors editions together with Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

I hope to read more.

The Luckiest Girl In The School & The Girls of St. Cyprian's

Hello there. It's me again and today I'm going to talk about something that's a part of being my age regressed self and a part of my actual childhood, reading and the girls stories we had at school.

Stories about the fictional lives of school children were very much what we read of not least for being having the kind of situations in them that although they are about girls and although these were set in the early Twentieth century, there was less difference between our lives and theirs as perhaps is the case today.

The Girls of St, Cyprians story is centred around a local inter school annual competition called the "Alliance" and is about Mildred Lancaster an orphaned Fifth former who has an inherited talent for the violin but is disappointed to find  she isn't chosen to represent the school in the Music section of the competition due to her day dreaming.

In order to fulfill her dreams for her future she needs to make a decision and to learn a lesson

The luck the Luckiest Girl in the School refers to is the luck one Winona has following feeling out of her depth, getting low marks with her teachers accusing of her of laziness. 

This would be odd as the mysteries of Geometry and Latin keep her glued to her books well into the night.

She realizes the dreadful truth-that she's an impostor in the School-and her days at Seaton High School, won on a scholarship are over. She becomes indeed the Luckiest Girl in the School.

These copies are my original Armada paperback editions from Nineteen Sixty-nine so there is a little wear as you'd expect being read as a child and surviving the big wooden toy box when we moved.