Good morning everyone,

How are you doing, alright? I have been thinking this week about some books I loved in my childhood, those of Enid Blyton, and before I knew what had happened I got carried away on that theme and here is a newsletter.

Enid Blyton wrote about 10K words a day, it's been a while since I read any of them but apparently as an adult you can sort of tell that she was putting the emphasis on quantity. It's also important to note here that I couldn't really find anything on the internet that was saying anything nice about Enid Blyton's books. The articles I could find tended to be about how sexist and racist and classist they are, and I expect that is true. I'm certainly not advising you to rush out and buy a set for your own children. But when I was reading her school stories, the world that they depicted was enough like my life that I could imagine it, and far enough away from my life to feel weird and magical. Like good science fiction.

Another thing that her school stories did – which good science fiction also does – was flag up the inadequacies of our own world. For example, midnight feasts. Midnight feasts, in the school books, were this incredible treat, food tasted better at them, they allowed participants to be the people they really were rather than the people they felt they had to be, plus it was a high subterfuge activity with real stakes if an adult found out.

I was, if not constantly, pretty often, trying to recreate these conditions. A futile effort. Our parents fundamentally did not care that my cousin and I were eating Smarties in bed at 10.30pm with both of our personalities fully intact, and the Smarties, obviously, tasted exactly like Smarties.

Imagine, then, after thirty or so years of this just boiling away inside me, how delighted I was to find that Ysenda Maxtone Graham has written a book – an oral history – all about life in girls' boarding schools in the exact period described by Enid Blyton. The fact that life was very far from that described in the St Clare's books only makes me want to read it more:

Wherever you were, the food was terrible:

The very same pudding – sponge-roll with red jam smeared along the surface and oozing out of both ends – was known as ‘Dead Man’s Leg’ at Wycombe Abbey, ‘Matron’s Leg’ at St Elphin’s, Darley Dale, ‘Granny’s Leg’ at Southover, and ‘Reverend Mother’s Leg’ at the Presentation Convent in Matlock. This shows how very like a varicose-veiny or actively bleeding human leg the puddings must have looked.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n16/tom-crewe/a-girl-called-retina

I don't think I will ever stop laughing at that extract. The whole article is great. I cannot wait to read the book.

As I remember it I pretty much promise you at least two links per newsletter. I don't have a recipe for Dead Man's Leg so how about a ginger ale based one from the Vintage Cookbook Trials:

This one is pretty simple. You freeze and periodically stir ginger ale till you get an icy mash, like a primitive version of a slushy. It is pretty hard to mess up – as long as the ginger ale is acceptable tasting to start with, so will be the final result.

https://vintagecookbooktrials.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/pears-frozen-with-ginger-ale-and-frapped-ginger-ale/

If you have a particularly funny school story that you think I would enjoy, I would certainly enjoy it. Tell me everything.

Love,

Alex xxx.