The Worst Witch: the Advent of Magic

Home , Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, Susan Cooper

chapter 6 The Worst Witch: The Advent of Magic

With Jill Murphy’s Worst Witch Series a new chapter of the school story begins. Whereas the classic school story had declined after the Second World War and had reached a final peak of popularity with Enid Blyton’s The Twins at St Clare’s and Malory Towers series, the genre split up and with the “St Trinian’s or the Nigel Molesworth books, … became pure farce”.1 Other authors, like Cecil Day Lewis in The Otterbury Incident, still succeeded in incorporating the topic of school in their books, but now they were day schools, not boarding schools anymore.2 Since there was a vast “gulf between fictional schools and the actual lives of home and day school lived by the vast majority of children”,3 the genre seemed exhausted. The Worst Witch, first published in 1974, now saw the advent of the witch in an otherwise rather traditional school story setting. One reason for the merging of fantasy and the school story in order to re- vive it was probably the great success of fantastic literature in the 1950s and 60s. Those two decades are even seen as a second “golden age” of children’s literature and a “heyday for fantasy books in Britain”,4 exemplified in the Narnia Chronicles of C.S. Lewis or Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. It is no wonder, then, that fantasy had a great impact on future writers who, by merging the two genres, created the witch school story. By using a successful genre such as fantasy to imbue the declining school story with new life, success seemed fairly sure to be achieved, as this new, yet familiar, genre consisted of two already very popular genres. However, there might be other reasons for the advent of the witch school story. As Sinfield contends:

… at the end of a war that had shown the terrible consequences of fas- cist ideology, that had ended with the use of a weapon of unprecedented power, and that had produced a popular impetus towards social reform, one might have expected political involvement. But … the instinct of lit- erary intellectuals was to defend traditional ground.5

1 Quigly, The Heirs of Tom Brown, 76. 2 See ibid., 275. 3 Hollindale and Sutherland, “Internationalism, Fantasy and Realism”, 278. 4 Ibid., 256 and 273. 5 Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989, 87.

134 chapter 6

Karen Sands-O’Connor argues in the same vein that the socio-political chang- es that occurred after World War ii made many authors turn to the past or to fantasy in order to avoid post-war life. Moreover, she claims that even the fantastic worlds were often modelled on the past. Faced with the loss of the Empire and unable to cope with huge waves of immigration, and thus new concepts of Britishness, many British authors suffered from a sort of identity crisis and a kind of escapism in literature occurred as many authors found it hard to deal with the new realities of British life. By transferring their stories into a historical or fantastic setting, they could easily avoid facing those new realities.6 Thus, there is a continuation of pre-War values, but also prejudices to discern. An interesting example here might be C.S. Lewis and his Narnia series. Al- though he was writing from a Christian point of view, his treatment of the Arab-like inhabitants of Calormen is racist, reminding us of the perception of the Oriental Other as described by Said.7 The Calormene are depicted as treach- erous gluttons who would not refrain from betraying their own kin.8 Another famous example could be found in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, where the black Haradrim, humans who are in league with Sauron, riding on Oliphants and fighting with scimitars instead of swords, are depicted as “black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues”,9 and stand in stark contrast to the noble Rohirrim, who were modelled on the Anglo-Saxons. There is no denying that those authors had a great impact on future writers, not only due to their works, but also because both were lecturing at Oxford, and although their own books were never part of their lectures, many of their students, such as Diana Wynne Jones, Penelope Lively, Jill Paton Walsh and Penelope Farmer, later became famous writers.10 Butler also adds to the list Alan Garner and Susan Cooper, who were both at Oxford at the time but studied different subjects.11

6 See Karen Sands-O’Connor, “Nowhere To Go, No One To Be: Diana Wynne Jones and the Concepts of Englishness and Self-Image”, in Diana Wynne Jones: An Exciting and Exacting Wisdom, ed. Teya Rosenberg et al., New York: Peter Lang, 2002, 13–15. 7 See Said, Orientalism, 39. 8 See especially C.S. Lewis, “Chapter Eight – In the House of the Tisroc”, in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Horse and His Boy, New York: HarperCollins, 2001, 256–61. 9 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings Pt. iii: The Return of the King, 2nd edn, London: Un- win, 1966, 121. 10 See Diana Wynne Jones, “The Profession of Science Fiction: Answers to Some Questions”, The Official Diana Wynne Jones Website: http://www.leemac.freeserve.co.uk/questions. htm (accessed 12 April 2010). Originally published in Foundation, 70 (Summer 1997), 5–14. 11 See Charles Butler, Four British Fantasists: Place and Culture in the Children’s Fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper, Lanham, md: Children’s Literature Association and Scarecrow Press, 2006, 7–8 and 14–15.