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THE FIRST DAY OF TERM
THE bestselling author suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life.
EVERYONE looks equally nervous at the school gates on the first day of term — the new pupils going in and the parents waving them off. But we don’t always look equally presentable.
The pupils are all shorn and polished, their uniform — temporarily, at least — smart and correct. We adults, on the other hand, can look a little wild, a little Robinson Crusoe. It’s hard to maintain the usual standards during six weeks of summer holidays with no free time.
Muriel Spark’s Miss Jean Brodie doesn’t have children of her own to take to a theme park, so she returns to the Marcia Blaine School in fine fettle and can declare to her new girls: ‘The holidays just past have convinced me that my prime has truly begun.’
Lucky her. And lucky girls. They might not know it on the first day, but their years with this teacher will be an extraordinary journey, which will change them — and the magnificent Miss Brodie — for ever.
Starting a new school is an experience fraught with anxiety (‘Will I fit in?’). Poor Lee, at the beginning of Curtis Sittenfeld’s wonderfully amusing debut Prep, is suffering badly, and rightly so. She’s an unsophisticated girl in a snooty new environment, convinced everyone finds her ‘strange and stupid’ and that the whole thing is a terrible mistake.
Soon enough, she does become part of that elite community — but only by sacrificing too much of her true self. Sometimes it’s best not to fit in.
It’s not just back to school for the pupils, of course. The staff also have to face a new academic year.
E. R. Braithwaite’s To Sir, With Love is a grittier novel than the film it became. Semi-autobiographical, it is about the teaching experience of a demobbed soldier in an East End school in the Fifties. His class is initially hostile to him and, as he’s black, so, too, is much of London.
Poor teachers: they not only have their own problems, they’ve got to put up with our children, too.