Word: lippington
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Dates: during 1981-1981
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...along the passage as Mother Radcliffe passed. Most were no more than quick, springy bobs, but some were deep and slow and wonderful to watch." These are among the first observations of Fernanda Grey, who at nine embarks on the frightening experience of going to boarding school at Lippington in the last decade before World War I. And an exotic place it is, tending to the daughters of "old, great Catholic families, the frontierless aristocracy of Europe." Nanda is a bright, pretty little girl, but she has two disadvantages: she comes from the middle class (rather than the upper class...
British Novelist Antonia White, who died in 1980 at 81, attended a school like Lippington (formal name: the Convent of the Five Wounds) with handicaps like Nanda's: she was the daughter of a classics master who had just converted to Roman Catholicism. Her autobiographical Frost in May, first published in 1933, has just appeared here in paperback, along with three sequels. As Elizabeth Bowen writes in the introduction, it is one of the best school novels ever written...
White's picture of Lippington is indelible. Nanda learns that each room has a name ("I was just rushing into St. Mary Magdalene without my gloves when Mother Prisca came out of St. Peter Claver and caught me"). The more pious children lay out their stockings at night in the shape of a cross. There are some hilarious set pieces. Nanda's group make their First Communion with students at the associated "poor school." Hurriedly helping one of these girls with her veil, a nun drives a safety pin through the child's ear. For the Lippington...
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