It was a great escape for plucky girls everywhere

Stridently backwards perhaps, but Bunty was kind of fun, according to former Bunty girl, Ciara O’Connor

THIS week, the Sunday Independent is giving away a Bunty comic — and it’s not as a hint that we should be returning to the 1950s.

Bunty is a valuable social document: a record of a time and a values system that we shouldn’t forget. But aside from its stridently backwards ideals, Bunty is kind of fun.

In many respects, I’m a bad feminist: I went to see Dunkirk at the cinema to better enjoy the smorgasbord of perfect male bone structure and tousled hair in glorious hi-def. I did not tweet about the lack of female roles afterwards. I maintain that taking bins out is a man’s job. And yes — I read Bunty as a child. And I’m not sorry.

I wasn’t sure whether it was a kind of false memory implanted by collective nostalgia, or a retrospectively overactive imagination, but I was sure I was a Bunty girl. It must have started out as a joke — my mother gave me an annual for Christmas. But you can’t trust children with these things and very soon I was hooked. And not in the kind of detached ironic way that I imagine today’s eight-yearolds are probably capable of.

By the time they packed up publishing for good in 2001, I was a card-carrying member of the Bunty Club (I sent away for the badge). I was 11 then, which means I could be among the very youngest on the planet to have gone to the shop with my pocket money to catch up on the quaint antics of the Four Marys.

The Bunty years, as I call them in the memoirs of my mind, were times of blissful innocence: before the problem pages of Mizz, with their talk of boys and boobs, from which I would piece together rudimentary and deeply con- fused sex education. It was a time before the ‘Cringe’ page taught me what I should be embarrassed about (periods, speaking in front of boys, my mother) and before I would read — half-horrified, halffascinated — about crushes and kissing.

Bunty never offered free hair mascara and body glitter. It was the anti-Mizz: it offered pure escapism. Nothing so prurient as hormones, but plucky orphans and boarding schools aplenty. I couldn’t relate, and I think that’s why I liked it.

But it was very much a product of its time: from the moment ‘feminism’ became a household word, Bunty’s days were numbered.

I was almost scared to check out our offering this week — would it poison my childhood memories? Would I ever be able to forgive my mother for the sexist propaganda she introduced me to? Yes and no. In a dark and uncertain 2017, it is not always bad to take a stroll down memory lane — and in fact much better, according to Bunty, than a “quiet stroll in the country”.

Page 11, A Walk with Danger, illustrates the perils that one may encounter on such an outing. Bunty girls should look out for eagles, swans and flowers. No mention, however, of the prophylactics and cups of poo that Derrynane walkers were treated to last week. Perhaps sometimes nostalgia for simpler times, with simpler dangers, is OK.

The Four Mary’s is Bunty’s most iconic series. The girls remained suspended in third form at St Elmo’s boarding school for 40 years. In our comic today, their main problem is some lazy mean girls on a group project — cleaning a house. It’s kind of painful now to see this taking up “two sessions a week” at a girls’ boarding school. But in fairness, the Marys represent a kind of rudimentary attempt at diversity — you see, one of them is poor. Simpy’s working-class (or ‘lower-class’ for the mean girls) background is something she is not ashamed of, “I’m proud of it, in fact”. One can only imagine how groovy the writers felt at the time for such a notion.

Anyway, the whole story might as well take place on the moon for all the sense it will make to kids now. Housecraft? Classes? Cleaning a house in school?

Reading it back, the four Marys are kind of unbearable swots. Their desperation to win the cleanest house is a bit... lame. It wouldn’t fly on Nickelodeon.

Cleaning is quite the theme. ‘Tina the Tester’ works testing products before they go on sale. It’s utterly cracked in its complete mundanity. Tina, a dead-ringer for Brigitte Bardot, needs to find a dirty oven to test an oven cleaner. That is the story. That’s it.

She is disheartened by all the clean ovens she finds — “too many good housewives in this town”. None of the housewives, however, seem too concerned about driving out to the country to dump their white goods.

The Bunty girls of its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s will have been coming of age in a time when ‘women’s lib’ was entering the public lexicon. It’s not surprising that feminism made it into the comic magazine in stories such as ‘Tommy the Tomboy’, which you can read today.

The premise — a girl is being taught how to be a man in order to steal their jobs — may or may not read as completely mad. The comic, like all useful historical documents, holds a mirror up to what a lot people felt at the time.

But perhaps Bunty isn’t as outdated as us hip cool liberal types would like to think — online forums are bursting with people who truly believe feminists want to morph into, then destroy, men. And maybe even keep a few of them locked up for breeding purposes.

Perhaps Tommy is the ultimate gender-fluid feminist hero we all need. She’s able to crush a man’s hand, but also make him feel big for saving her from a mouse in order to fleece him for money. She’s a genius. Or maybe it’s just a depressing portrait of a society that was desperate to resist equality.

If you gave kids now what we had to eat when we were small, you’d probably be arrested. Likewise, with our reading material: the values that Bunty held dear range from the quaint to the deeply offensive. But just like a Mars Bar, once in a while it is okay, even good for you. So, open up Bunty and let’s see how far we’ve come — and how far we haven’t.