books set in the school holidays, giving a rounded picture of the lives of the twins as
they grow from 12 to over 14.
By 1960 it was felt that the traditional school story had run its course and certainly
few new titles were appearing. Elsie Jeanette Oxenham’s last book was published in
1959, Dorita Fairlie Bruce’s in 1961; these are so weak compared with their authors’
earlier work that they seem to provide an appropriate death knell. There was, however, a
continuing demand for school stories, particularly from girls, and titles stayed
stubbornly in print. The last Chalet School book was published posthumously in 1970,
but in 1967 paperback editions of earlier titles were successfully launched and have
continued to sell in their thousands each year since.
If interest in writing school stories petered out in the 1960s, it was clear by 1970 that
some major children’s writers might find still the enclosed world of school an ideal
framework within which to explore matters of concern to young people. Penelope Farmer’s
Charlotte Sometimes (1969) marks the beginning of this revival; in a satisfying time travel
story, the author ex-plores the question of identity through Charlotte who goes to school
some time in the 1960s and wakes up one morning to find she has changed places with
Clare who was a pupil in 1918. How, Charlotte wonders, can the schoolgirls and
teachers in 1918 accept her as Clare, and why is Clare so readily accepted in the 1960s?
Later, Barbara Willard’s Famous Rowena Lamont (1983), Michelle Magorian’s Back
Home (1985) and Ann Pilling’s The Big Pink (1987) were all to use the conventions of the
boarding school story to explore the problems of growing up and adjustment, but they
also break away from the accepted pattern. Rusty, the heroine of Back Home, for
example, is one of the few schoolgirl heroines to be expelled. In Frances Usher’s
Maybreak (1990) the conventions are essential to the fast-moving plot. There were even
two new series set in girls’ boarding schools, Anne Digby’s Trebizon books, launched in
1978, and Harriet Martyn’s stories about Balcombe Hall, which began in 1982.
Two books published in the USA in the 1970s contrast with the British school story,
where, despite the developments in the genre, integration and the triumph of good over
evil continued to be the norm. Robert Cormier’s controversial book, The Chocolate War
(1974) is set in the all-boys Catholic day school, Trinity. It is a sad, pessimistic story;
Brother Leon, in charge of the annual fund-raising event, which involves the selling of
twenty thousand boxes of chocolates, is helped by The Vigils, a powerful secret society
led by the corrupt bully, Archie Costello. Jerry Renault, a new boy with hidden
strengths, refuses to participate and is trapped into a fight which he cannot win, his
downfall and humiliation brought about with the compliance of Brother Leon. The school
setting is essential to the story and makes the triumph of evil over good all the more
horrifying.
Rosemary Wells’s The Fog Comes on Little Pig Feet (1972) is based on the author’s
experiences. Rachel lasts two weeks at North Place, a private New England girls’ boarding
school, where she is appalled by the lack of freedom, the snobbery and the corruption;
favourable treatment can apparently by bought by rich fathers for their rebellious or
under-achieving daughters. Instead of settling down in time-honoured fashion, Rachel is
allowed to return home.
In the 1970s, British authors set stories for younger children in primary schools,
which offer an environment in which children from different cultural and ethnic
TYPES AND GENRES 353