Princess Pat

by Katharine L. Oldmeadow, Rosa C. Petherick (Illustrator)

310 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1924

About the author

Born in 1878 in Chester, British children's author Katharine Louise Oldmeadow was the daughter of police superintendent George Edward Oldmeadow, and his wife Annie Shepherd. She lived for over fifty years in the village of Highcliff, near the New Forest - a setting which featured in many of her stories. In addition to the books published under her own name, she also used the pseudonym Pamela Grant. She died in 1963.

Reviews

[Louise Culmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pat O’Grady and her father live in Castle Grady in County Wicklow. The great days of their family are passed and their home is impoverished and shabby, even the grand carved staircase from the hall has been sold to ‘a rich and enthusiastic American’. But Pat and her father love their home and they love Ireland but alas they are loyalists and it is a dangerous time to be a loyalist in Ireland ‘Danger dogged the footsteps of the loyalists by night and day; perhaps the bravest of them grew used to her, and, thankful for a roof over their heads, clung to the country they loved and hoped that the dark hour would pass.’ A neighbour is sending her daughter Moria to a boarding school run by a Miss Hart for the daughters of loyalist families, and suggests to Pat’s father that Pat should go too. Mr O’Grady sells some remaining valuables to pay for Pat’s schooling, and she and Moria are despatched. They find the new school a complex place, their new friend Peggy explains it to them:
“This is a queer sort of house. Miss Hart is an Ulster woman and an Imperialist, and she expects us to be Imperialists too. There’s Eileen for the Free State, and I’m all for decent Home Rule - not misrule - if we could get it, though I’m not saying King George isn’t a good sort. There’s Shelagh, a republican who ought to be locked up in Dublin Castle, and Parnell the cat - cook named him that - is a conscientious objector and doesn’t hold with killing rats and mice.”
Pat and Peggy eventually find themselves involved in an adventure more frightening than is the norm with girls school stories, and the whole book is full of a pervasive air of the danger that loyalists face in Ireland. It’s an interesting and quite unusual story though perhaps, not surprisingly, rather heavily biased in the loyalists favour. But the republicans encountered in the book are not shown as just villainous, towards the end of the book a republican performs an unexpected act of generosity, and Pat realises:
“This was topsy-turvey Ireland - where the treacherous can be faithful, too, the cruel tender, the grasping generous.”