Revisiting an Old Friend.

My mother is a clever woman.  She did very well in school, motivated by the lure of the coveted book prizes that were always awarded to the best scholar.  I inherited her prize books.  These are mostly either the Billabong series by Australian Author Mary Grant Bruce or the *Dimsie*  school stories by English author Dorita Fairlie Bruce.

I wasn't a discriminating reader.  The books were there; I read them. The Billabong books have worn pretty well & I have read them all though I don't yet own them all.  They have been reprinted several times & are on my list of things to be acquired but the Dimsie books are different.  For one thing they are now extremely dated.  For another they have been much more difficult to acquire, especially the first book & the 2  outside of the school setting when Dimsie is all grown up.

I have been waiting a while but these 3 arrived just before Christmas & I have Dimsie Carries On due next week.  What fascinates me about these books is not their storylines, mostly highly improbable & requiring a well exercised suspension of belief, but their historicity.

Books like these reflect with devastating accuracy the cultural mores of the times.  I am old enough, just, to remember all the pink bits on the map were *us* ~ the British Empire.  Us was important. In our family half the family was still in Scotland. The MOTH's family were 2 pound migrants out of Glasgow. For many Australians *going home* still meant visiting England.  Thankfully we're over the cultural cringe now but more than the history books that only tell you what happened, books like Dimsie tell you how people thought ~ & that is infinitely fascinating.

I had only ever read Dimsie Goes to School once, a long, long time ago.  Re~reading it as an adult I wondered that the main theme was considered suitable reading material for children ~ not the card cheating which, by today's standards is very small beans indeed ~ but the death of a child, mental illness, abandonment...And it is so strange now, seeing such a clear demarcation between the school child & the adult & how young the teenagers seem by today's standards.

However, one thing that really, really stood out to me, was the impact of WWI.  No, all the stories except the last are set between the wars but we see the beginnings of Armistice Day, so ingrained now, & the ongoing impact of men who had been through one war only to be spat out crippled, deformed, mentally scarred.  And let's not forget the hair when hair was still a woman's crowning glory & a *bob* the height of modernity!

Canada's *Anne* books actually pre~date Dimsie but have aged better, as have the Billabong books. This is due partly, I think, to a more unconventional central character & partly to more universal environments that haven't changed as much as the boarding school. In Dimsie's world the co~ed boarding school is unthinkable.

Dorita Fairlie Bruce was only one of many, many authors of school stories for girls & one of the more popular ones @ that.  In the way of these things I also owned a smattering of the other popular authors of the time: Brent~Dyer [the Chalet School books], Angela Brazil, & of course Elsie  J. Oxenham [The Abbey Girls] ~ all hugely popular in their day & time, now often hard to get your hands on unless you are a serious collector.  I'm not.  Collecting the Dimsie books fills out the series my mother owned, nothing more, nothing less.