Annie Murray, author
Miss Purdy's Class
A captivating novel of courage, belief and love
In the New Year of 1936, Gwen Purdy, aged twenty-one, leaves her home to become a schoolteacher in a poor area of Birmingham. Her early weeks are an eye-opener: at the school she faces a class of fifty-two children, some of whose homes are among Birmingham’s very poorest. One of the teachers, the elderly Lily Drysdale, proves an inspiration, and Gwen begins to understand the appalling hardships endured by the children as she is drawn into their lives.
Joey Phillips, eight years old and man of the house, looks after his dying mother and lives in fear of being sent to the orphanage. When he disappears one day to a life on the streets, Gwen is haunted by his absence.
And there’s Lucy Fernandez, an epileptic. Through her, Gwen meets Daniel Fernandez, the eldest brother in a fatherless household. Gwen falls in love and is quickly engaged in his battle to win rights for the working classes. As the International Brigades are mobilized to fight in the Spanish Civil War, Gwen has to accept that Daniel has secrets in his past which she would rather not face up to…
Writing the book
I like writing about children because that is a time of life when our perceptions of the world are very intense, and children are so vulnerable to the fortunes of adults. I also wanted to write a book about a school in the difficult days of the 1930s, and so Canal Street School came into being, a Victorian, red-brick school like the one my children and thousands of other people’s children have attended right up to the present day.
But as ever the story expanded! Gwen Purdy comes to Birmingham from the countryside, as I once did myself, and this was to be the story of a school. But somehow it became obvious that the year when the story would happen was 1936, and one of the families at the school was a Welsh/Spanish family who had come to Birmingham from the Welsh valleys in search of work….. And suddenly, from being a story just about a little school, it also included the British Communist Party, the struggles of the Welsh mining towns at that time, the hunger marches and the Spanish Civil War…
And at the heart of this, still, were children, especially Lucy Fernandez, sister of the idealistic Daniel, who Gwen falls so much in love with, and little Joey, who disappears from the school to become one of the children who slipped through the net in the 1930s to live among other vagrants who were trying to keep a life together on the streets.