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Previous Back Page features:
DECEMBER 2021 - Enid Blyton's Little Noddy
JANUARY 2022 - The Whiteoaks of Jalna
FEBRUARY 2022 - Leslie
Charteris's The Saint
The
year is 1964, I've just started work at the Public Library in
Stevenage, and everyone is talking about... The Passion Flower Hotel!
...I remember
that day as if it was yesterday - I'd written to the librarian at
Stevenage Central Library to ask if there were any jobs going, told him
what my qualifications were - seven decent O Level passes and a year of
A Level study; I'd had an interview and they'd offered me a job as a
library assistant, which I'd accepted - of course - it had always been
my dream to work in a library, and here I was, the Tuesday after the
Easter weekend in 1964, starting my dream job in a huge building
absolutely crammed with books! In those days, I think there were about
twenty-four staff: the librarian, John NIghtingale, the deputy
librarian, Patrick Kelly, the children's librarian, Miss Sullivan,
the reference librarian, Melvin, two or three other qualified
librarians, and a dozen to fifteen library assistants. Of course we
talked endlessly about books, and someone always had a recommendation
or a suggestion - this was the era of James Bond books, of Poldark
books, of Forsyte saga books, and books that were in some way connected
with the new thing everyone was always talking about - television -
David Attenborough's Zoo Quest programmes were either based on or
spawned books, for example. I was comparatively new to television, of
course. In Brockworth we had been "the family who didn't have
television", a fact of which I had been immensely proud at the time,
but now it was necessary to have a television because it was what
people talked about, and as a special treat for Christmas 1963, Dad
went next door at the Hyde shopping parade to the Rediffusion shop, and
rented us a television. The first programme I remember watching that
Christmas was Thunderbirds. Of course I had seen a television before -
our next door neighbours in Brockworth, Gloucester, had invited us in
to watch the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, although I have to say
that with about twenty people crowded around a nine inch set, there
wasn't much to see, and I wasn't impressed. Occasionally I went round
to Great Aunt Grace's house to watch Robin Hood or the Lone Ranger, but
she wasn't a very nice person, and I preferred to be at home with my
books.
Now, in the library, I was with people my own age and
we nearly always ended up talking about books which suited me just
fine. Rosalind Erskine's The Passion Flower Hotel was published in 1962
and the Pan Giant paperback would have followed shortly afterwards. It
was an immediate sensation. I had no idea at the time that Rosalind
Erskine was actually a man: Roger Erskine Longrigg, but it didn't
matter, everyone was talking about it and I grabbed one of the library
copies at the earliest opportunity, went home and read it. My
four regular weekly comics as a young teenager were the Lion, the
Tiger, the Schoolfriend and the Girls Crystal, the latter two being my
sister Jean's, of course, but I was the one who read them avidly. All
four comics were peppered with school stories, like the Silent Three in
the Schoolfriend, and Sandy Dene in the Lion. I also occasionally
bought a Billy Bunter book - he wasn't my favourite character, that was
Harry Wharton, the leader of the Famous Five at Greyfriars School. My
favourite genre of children's story has always been, for as long as I
can remember, the boarding school story. Nowadays, if you were to
glance at my bookshelves, you would see a complete set of Enid Blyton's
Malory Towers, St Clares and the Naughtiest Girl; an almost complete
set of Elinor M Brent-Dyer's Chalet School series, and dozens more
1950s and 1960s children's school story adventures. Now here, in the
Stevenage Public Library, was a distinctly adult book set in a girls'
boarding school, with adult themes of sex, prostitution etc., and
everyone, simply everyone was raving about it. As soon as I could, I
bought my own copy, a Pan Giant, with that utterly delightful cover
illustration ofGinger Rogers, and how heGin Sarah Callender, the girl behind the planned scheme, to
sell sexual favours to the boys from the local boys' boarding school,
for money... It's a delicious, delightful romp, written by someone who
obviously felt the same way about boarding school stories as I did, and
it's remained one of my favourite books of all time - a very thin one,
compared with even the shortest book by Stephen King, but nevertheless
a tour de force of 1960s morals in the era known as the Swinging
Sixties, a brilliant book, a charming book, a legendary book I'm proud
to own.
The
Passion Flower Hotel, with that stunning cover artwork, is probably my
favourite of all the Pan Books I ever owned, or indeed saw, although
the Angélique books by Sergeanne Golon (Serge and Anne Golon) come a
close second. I doubt if I even thought about paperback cover art in
the 1960s, when I was collecting them - I was far more interested in
the content! It was only when I started to recollect them in the 1990s
(probably the decade in which I started to discover the delights of car
boot sales) that I realised just how good they were. In the 1960s there
were loads of paperback publishers - Penguin, Pan, Fontana, etc., etc.,
but it was Pan Books who published far and away the most spectacularly
good books with stunning covers. At the top of this page you'll see the
cover of A SUMMER PLACE - this was the blockbuster film which
introduced me to Sandra Dee, and although the artist has the young
couple (Troy Donohue is the boy in the film) walking away, there's no
mistaking that it's Sandra Dee in the illustration, and that was enough
for me. I don't think there were any other Sandra Dee films that were
based on books, or any other books based on her films. I would collect
American film magazines with feature articles on the girl I believed
was the most beautiful in the world, and the book of A SUMMER PLACE
remained a firm favourite of mine. The Angélique books I discovered bny
accident whilst reading a copy of the weekly magazine TITBITS, which
serialised the first book. I would have been ten years old when I first
discovered Angélique - it helped to fuel my growing interest in the
opposite sex, and struck me as quite erotic at the time, though
comparatively tame nowadays.
The
small print: Books
Monthly, now well into its 24th
year on the web,
is published on or slightly before the first day of each month by Paul
Norman. You can contact me here.
If you wish to submit something for publication in the magazine, let me
remind you there is no payment as I don't make any money from this
publication. If you want to send me something to review, contact me via
email at paulenorman1@gmail.com and I'll let you know where to send it.
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