Great Ormond Street Hospital–where Mary Lou goes to train
One of the fun things about traveling is the weird associations that can pop up as you are walking down a street. While in London, Mr. Miscellany, Ruby, and I were walking through Bloomsbury when we passed this sign.
Seeing the name of the hospital–Great Ormond Street Hospital–immediately made me remember some books I had read when I was in seventh grade. My family was living in Vienna, and to get reading material, almost every weekend we made a trip to the no-longer-in-existence British Bookstore. The fact that it was the British, and not the American, bookstore was key. It was filled with books by British authors, one of whom was Enid Blyton, an incredibly prolific (supposedly she wrote about 800 books) children’s author.
My sisters and were already somewhat familiar Enid Blyton because we had, through our British neighbor in the States, read a few of the Famous Five and Adventure series books.
Until we found them in the bookstore, we, shockingly, had no idea about the girls’ boarding school books! She wrote two series that my sisters and I read to pieces — St. Clare’s and Malory Towers, about the travails, friendships, shenanigans, sports competitions, and midnight feasts of the characters as they progress book-by-book through school. The books were written after WWII, but are set just before it, in an idyllic Britain. I blame my lifelong love of books set in boarding schools on these.
So, to circle back to my photo…My favorite was the Malory Towers series (and, if you want to start a debate among Enid Blyton fans, ask which school they’d rather have gone to!). Who wouldn’t want to go to a school in Cornwall that looks like a castle? In the last book, as most of them are about to finish school, the main character, Darrell, and her friends discuss their plans for the future. Darrell, the main character, and her best friend, Sally, and two other girls are off to St. Andrew’s. Gwendolyn, the spoiled girl who saw the light when her father almost died, is going to take a practical, secretarial course. The head girl is off to join her parents in India, and so on. Mary-Lou (little Mary Lou, as she’s called in the books), the quiet, shy, very kind girl announces that she is off to train to be a children’s nurse at the Great Ormond Street Hospital.
I remembered all that when I saw the hospital sign.