The Madcap of the School by Christine Chaundler

The Madcap of the School by Christine Chaundler

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There was a point in reading this where I thought about how disappointed the average schoolgirl in the 1930s or 1940s might have been when her school didn’t burn down, nobody fell down a pit and needed rescuing, the school’s honour could not be saved by getting that vital goal in the last few minutes or impressing the local dignitaries so much with your daring-do that you all got an extra day of school holiday because of it. I mean, the disappointment of an average term! Not one broken bone requiring setting with just a twig and a doily!

What you might be gathering from this is that Chaundler’s exploits in The Madcap of the School and the other short story of this volume (“The Prize For Valour”) tend towards the more sensational end of the genre. The title story is the better of the two and focuses upon Judy’s unadulterated pash for one of her mistresses who first thinks poorly of her and realises what a good egg she is! It’s not a spoiler, trust me, if you know the genre then you know how this is going to end up from page one. But it’s still a very dynamic and well-told story that sort of deliriously hurtles from incident to incident and does it all in under fifty pages and god, I love that sort of attitude very much. Give me feverish info-dumps, give me wild and overblown drama and resolve it all in thirty seconds, ugh, I love it, books like this, they’re the bomb.

The second title in the volume is a slightly more complicated thing. Chaundler’s still focused on that whole big and overblown vibe in her work but manages to carry it off with aplomb. The girls are concerned with winning a prize for valour but oh no! there’s a wet lettuce in the form who’s scared of everything! What on earth will happen? (We all know, right?). Despite reinforcing my conviction that no author of this period quite knew what an artery was or indeed where one might be, this is great stuff. Two sandwiches short of a picnic, deeply incomprehensible, deliciously delirious stuff. Perfect. Five stars. Fifty five stars. Ratings are inconsequential!

View all my reviews