Published: 4 March 2010
by RUTH GORB

FLORA Fox, a modern 12-year-old schoolgirl – sophisticated, spoilt, thoroughly objectionable – is whisked away by magic to boarding school in the 1930s. The dormitory is freezing, the bloomers itchy, there is no shower gel. 

Serves her right, you say. But deep down you envy her: what jolly times they all had in those schoolgirl stories, in the world created by the doyenne of them all, Angela Brazil, not to mention the adventures at The Chalet School… 

“All girls,” says Kate Saunders, “have an inner boarding school.”

She has written what she calls her homage to Angela Brazil. She devoured schoolgirl books as a child,  dusty old copies on her mother’s shelves, and now she has produced a modern take on a lost world that little bookworms will love – not to mention their mothers and grandmothers. 

A nostalgic creation  in a way, but, says Saunders, it couldn’t have been written from the point of view of 1930s schoolgirls. It had to have a modern heroine, and what better than to have her arrive in that lost world through magic. 

“There has to be fantasy for children, the tree with the little magic door that takes you into another world…” 

Except that Flora Fox’s other world is reached via a rough ride on a train and the first person she sees is not a fairy but a dumpy woman in brown felt hat and tweeds, reading Time and Tide: the archetypal 1930s school-mistress.

 Boarding school was only a fantasy for Kate Saunders. “I had a lovely family, and never would have wanted to leave home,” she says. 

Home had its own story-book quality: a large, crumbling house in Dartmouth Park Avenue where the family – bookish parents and six children – lived for 50 years. Only recently has Kate Saunders moved with her sister and 17-year-old son to a smaller house, a short walk from where she grew up. “I’m a very local girl; Camden School for Girls, my son is at William Ellis, and when I thought I’d be an actress I went to the Anna Scher Theatre School in Islington.”

She acted until she was 25, got married, and started to write – literary novels at first which enjoyed a quiet, well-bred success. She moved into journalism, in the good times, she says: “When one of the happiest sounds was the tapping of a typewriter through an open window on a summer afternoon. Gone forever.”

After that came her blockbusters, rich and fruity romantic novels that sold in gratifyingly large numbers; the first, Night Shall Overtake Us, was set during the First World War. They were good and they were successful, but success coincided with personal crisis: she got divorced, she lost her parents, she moved house. 

As a form of escape she started writing children’s books. They were funny and there was always magic. “I’m not into that realism school of single mothers on housing estates,” she says. “I’ll never win an award because I don’t want to depress my customers; I want to cheer them up.”

Beswitched has all the right cheering-up ingredients: it has a thumping good plot, it’s funny, and it’s slightly outrageous. Differences in common parlance are particularly appealing: Flora learns how to say “wizard,” and “crikey” and “you are a chump”  and causes some consternation when on one stressful occasion she shouts “bollocks!”  “I had a bit of trouble with the publisher over that, but it was a compromise,” says Saunders. “Flora would in fact have said ‘shit!’”

The odd thing, though, she says, is that she feels closer to the schoolgirls of the 1930s than she does to today’s liberated pre-teens. In the 1970s girls didn’t go to school in short skirts and earrings, they didn’t have laptops and iPods and mobile phones, they certainly didn’t have blonde highlights in their daily washed and conditioned hair. 

 The big, big difference though, she sighs, is traffic. “ I brought my son Felix up in the same street I grew up in. The change is unbelievable. I really did play in the street, go everywhere on my bike. The traffic in that street now is non-stop. Do you blame people for keeping their children indoors? They’d rather have fat  kids than dead kids.”

Some things, of course, never change. “Headmis­tresses’ speeches,” she says, “same old stuff. But teachers are much nicer now.”

She could not avoid some serious issues in her time switch, although the girls in their 1930s school pooh-poohed the idea that there would be another world war. And there had to be some way, thought Flora, of stopping the Jewish girl in the school from going back to Vienna… Don’t worry; when time switched back again, Virginia married someone in the Foreign Office. Sadly, this is,  after all, a fairy story.

• Beswitched. By Kate Saunders. Scholastic £5.99

• Kate Saunders will be discussing her work at the Heath Library, Keats Grove, NW3,  on Wednesday March 17, 020 7947 6520.