Old Girl and author Pat Turner is celebrating success after a
publisher snapped up all six of her novels 60 years after the first
one was started.
Over more than half a century, Mrs Turner has self-published
some of her books, while others have been taken on by companies,
but this is the first time the full set has been picked up by a
publishing house and marketed worldwide.
Her time at Bolton School Girls' Division was the inspiration
for the series of books, which are based on a fictitious boarding
school for girls in Cumbria, and Mrs Turner returned to the school
to personally donate a copy of the first book 'Prefects at Vivians'
to the Girls' Division library. She also brought along a copy of
her next manuscript which she is currently working on.
When 77-year-old Mrs Turner, who writes under her maiden name of
Caldwell, heard the novels had been picked up by Girls Gone By of
Bath she was delighted. She started writing at the age of 17 to
amuse herself while recovering from mumps but it was some time
before her first book was ready to submit to a publisher as the
novel was hand-written and she had to enlist the help of a friend
at the Bolton Evening News to type it up for her.
The book, 'Prefects at Vivians', was accepted by W and R
Chambers and they asked her to write a sequel, but after the second
book, Chambers dropped all "juvenile fiction" and by 1957 critics
and publishers had given up on the genre. In the 1990s a children's
book dealer in Edinburgh asked Mrs Turner to write more stories of
St Vivians as collectors were regularly asking for them, so the
final four were written and self-published through the 1990s right
through to 2008.
Mrs Turner, a former teacher at Whitecroft Road Girls School,
who lives in Harwood, has also written two Spanish text books.
'Prefects at Vivians' is now available at Sweetens Bookshop in
Deansgate, Bolton.