On Re-Reading "The Cricket Term"...

[sollersuk.livejournal.com]

...and the fuss about "Mask of Apollo"

In the early 1960s my school replaced "Form Libraries" (a dozen or so books kept in a cupboard) with a spanking new "Lower School Library" to complement the Upper School Library, which was only available to sixth formers; the new one had all books available to everybody, which meant from age about 12 onwards. It was there that I first read Tolkien. It was there that I noticed "I, Claudius" and "Claudius the God" but didn't first read them there because I had already done so at home.

It was there that I have now realised that I first read "The Mask of Apollo". If the publication details in my copy of "Cricket Term" are correct, this was a full decade before its first publication. I think I now understand my puzzlement over the fuss a bit better; I mean, I understand why I was puzzled. To be honest, I still am.

Comments

[owl]

If the publication details in my copy of "Cricket Term" are correct, this was a full decade before its first publication.

After, surely, unless Kingscote library is in L-Space :)

[sollersuk.livejournal.com]

Book says "First published by Faber & Faber Ltd" with a 1974 date; did they really not get their hands on it until that much later? "Last of the Wine" was I think first published in the very late 1950s ("Last of the Wine" was 1956 so it was not likely to be before 1957) and our new library opened in about 1959 now that I come to calculate accurately, only a few years after. Publication of "Mask of Apollo" is a terminus post quem for the writing of "Cricket Term", which brings it to the time the books were being made available to us at school, all down the school, no questions asked, in a very posh girl's grammar school in London.

[white_hart]

It's years since I read 'The Cricket Term', so I could be wrong, but I thought the fuss wasn't so much over the book itself being unsuitable as the fact that rules only allowed Nicola to bring one book from home and she'd brought two?

[sollersuk.livejournal.com]

There was also fuss over the fact that though it was available, it was limited to Upper Fifths and Sixth Formers only; and it is on those grounds that Ann refuses to take it on Nicola's behalf. (ndeed, the main thrust of the fuss is the fact that it's Limited. Even Nicola says "I do see it could throw the Thirds a bit if they got hold of it", but at my school both it and "I, Claudius" were readily available to the Thirds from 1959 onwards!

[oursin.livejournal.com]

According to The British Library Integrated Catalogue, The Mask of Apollo was first published in 1966 (and I seem to recall buying the p/b when I was still at university, maybe v early 70s).

[sollersuk.livejournal.com]

Are you certain? I can visualise it in the school library, and by 1966 I had left school. Was there really a ten year gap between "Last of the Wine" and it? I was also under the impression that I had bought the p/b in my first year at university, which was 1965 - I had discovered a proper bookshop for the first time and was buying as if books were going out of fashion!

In any case, if it was 1966 then the incident would have taken place long after my school saw the sex and sadism of "I, Claudius" as acceptable for Third Years.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I've now checked my copy and it does indeed say 1966 (I have, on occasion, found errors in the BL catalogue).

Possibly the argument for I Claudius was that it was all Historical Fact and In Suetonius (etc) - though see yesterday's Guardian for article about where RG was making stuff up (http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,1863003,00.html).

[elizahonig.livejournal.com]

Can anybody think of a good book that might have been Restricted in 1938? That's pre-Renault but I need one for my own novel. I had no ideas. Needs to be something that a clever 12-year-old would enjoy but that she couldn't legally take out herself. I vaguely remember my own parents refusing to let me watch a televised version of a Henry James novel (or was it Wilkie Collins) in about 1970, but I doubt that a 12-year-old would have wanted to read Henry James or that a school library would have had much Wilkie Collins.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

Six years later, it would be Forever Amber.

[thekumquat.livejournal.com]

When I first went to a rather similar boarding school in 1985, the Junior library was horrendously restricted. No 'young adult' type stuff at all! Let alone anything hinting at anyone having sex with anyone of any sexuality. Once you got into the Main School, though (3rd year, age 13), the fiction library had anything and everything, and the staff were just glad you were reading.

Although when I ordered Robert Cormier's "Beyond the Chocolate War" via the school bookshop, my form tutor - also the RE teacher - forbade the bookshop teacher from getting it for me. The bookshop teacher went and bought it from a local shop and pulled it out for me from under the counter!

I found it fascinating reading about AF's timelines, as I'd tried to figure out when they were set when I read the school stories in the mid-80s. My school still had some of the same dated rules, such as One Must Not Be Seen Eating In the Street, washing hair was only allowed more than once a week with permission from home, and jeans were forbidden. Kingscote doesn't seem that odd to me.

[mrs-redboots.livejournal.com]

Kingscote doesn't seem that odd to me.

Or to me, either, although I was at school in the 1960s, and the school was, I think, larger than Kingscote, and had boarding-houses. But three baths a week (only one at bedtime!), hair-washing once a fortnight (once a week on request from home, so we all requested, so it was changed), Saturday Shopping very limited - although unlike at Kingscote, when we did go (and you had to be in about what is now Year 10 to be able to go) we didn't have to say which shops we were going to, nor be accompanied by a prefect.

But the school did move slowly with the times - uniform was abolished for the Sixth Form in about 1966 or 67, although there was a pretty strict dress code, and even our after-school "mufti" was limited to skirts and jerseys, with a smart dress for Sunday lunch. Trouser suits were eventually allowed, but no jeans, and almost never any other sort of trousers.

My daughter's sixth form, a quarter of a century later and at a different school, still banned blue jeans, but black or other-coloured jeans were allowed!

[melandraanne.livejournal.com]

Kingscote doesn't seem that odd to me.

One of the reasons that Antonia Forest's books meant so much to me when I first found 'End of Term' was that Kingscote seemed so much like a real school, or more particularly so much like the boarding school I'd just spent three years in - and which I was rather missing ...

Silly little things like doors or corridors you were not meant to use, shopping trips, fusses about uniforms (the panic I caused when I came back to school wearing brown shoes because I'd outgrown the black ones and couldn't buy any locally !), not being supposed to go into other dormitories, table prefects, even down to having 'sister rooms' and large families of girls all at school together. It all rang so true...

[mrs-redboots.livejournal.com]

We certainly didn't have sisters' rooms - sisters were usually as widely separated as possible! And we weren't really supposed to have friends from a different year or (perish the thought!) a different House. Older girls were to be Respected, with a capital R.....

We didn't have table prefects, as such - we had assigned places to sit that changed daily and one was supposed to make Polite Conversation with one's neighbour. "Free table places" were allegedly a treat, although unpopular girls, as I was, dreaded them as you could never find anywhere to sit, and certainly never with your year group.

[thekumquat.livejournal.com]

We weren't supposed to have friends from different years, although different houses were OK. I had a friend from the year below which was considered pretty odd. No sisters' rooms, though.

We had table plans changed weekly, with a mixture of years making up the 7 people. The lower sixth took it in turns to design the table plan. Tea time was a scrum sitting where you liked. "Free flow suppers" on weekends were abolished as there was a bit of an anorexic epidemic and the Powers That Be wanted to keep track of people's eating. I was quite unusual in fitting in OK with lots of different groups - I think I was sort of respected for being intelligent while cynical about the school. Somewhat like Jan Scott, I was written off as being a Bad Influence for asking awkward questions, which suited me as prefects had no perks and had to make people behave in Chapel, whereas I preferred to skive off...