One author who doesn't appear to have been mentioned yet is Ronald Searle - although I suspect that full appreciation of Molesworth only comes with adulthood, when one realises that there were aspects of prep school life that he lampoons with deadly accuracy (the books were in effect banned in my prep school - anyone caught with one would have it confiscated and would be in quite serious trouble.  The irony of headmaster Grimes' outraged rant at Molesworth's claim to have read Proust ("a very grate Fr. writer") during the school holiday - "I see I am going to have to teach you culture the hard way. Report for the cane after prayers" - was no doubt lost on us, but the diagrams of grips and tortures for Masters certainly wasn't)

On a much happier note I've recently discovered that my old secondary school English teacher, Ian Whybrow, has now become quite a well-known children's author:



Edit:  I see Don B has just invoked the shade of Molseworth.

For those of us who went through a different kind of school altogether, the Molesworth books were a bit like anthropological surveys of some completely alien civilisation.

By the time I was old enough for Tolkien I'd become interested in SF of the "hard" variety and I've never much liked anything to do with elves and hobbits and suchlike. (At school I was a science swot who listened to weird music.)

I had weird reading tastes amongst children's books - I read the Charlie Brown ones, loved those, and at various points liked Just William, Billie Bunter, and Jennings and Derbyshire - but actually I preferred some of the girls' books, even the Mallory Towers and St Claire's ones - maybe all that catty stuff in amongst the heated all-female atmosphere, let alone the punishment references, provided the appeal when I was 9-10?

I always much preferred the characters you were meant to disapprove of - remember Alicia (FAR more interesting than holier-than-thou, Joan-Bakewell-in-the-making Darrell) and even Gwendoline Mary. At least they had some passions.

All reminds me of the experience later in life of watching the wonderful Powell/Pressburger film Black Narcissus (and, for denizens of M & S, that wasn't just because it featured nuns).

Molesworth, yes! My brother, poor boy, was at a school just like St Custard's. I was always on the side of Fotherington-Thomas - and then there was Molesworth 2's piano piece " Fairy Bells", which "nothing hav ever been known to stop". (Something like that, anyway.) The exam papers were good, too.

1066 and All That taught me all the history I know.

I didn't enjoy Tolkien, and stiil don't. I would never have dared say I didn't like him, because, as I have said before, my English teacher (or mistress, as we said then), whom I idolised, had been taught by Tolkien and had a bad case of hero worship.

Roald Dahl was before my time, as it were, but I love the Edwardian equivalent, Hilaire Belloc's Cautionary Tales.  I never knew them as a child, and I doubt whether I would have appreciated it then.  As it is I can quote it by the yard, like the Tale of Sarah Byng

...she could not read or write a line.
Her sister, Jane, though barely nine
Could spout the Cathechism through
And parts of Matthew Arnold too.
While little Bill, who came between,
Was quite unnaturally keen
On Athalie by Jean Racine.
But not so Sarah, not so Sal.
She was a most uncultured gal.

I knew these by the age of about 12, and I loved them.

The chief defect of Henry King
Was chewing little bits of string;
At last he swallowed some which tied
Itself in ugly knots inside


They weren't quite as realistic as Heinrich Hoffman.