Is this a Mallory Towers or St Claire’s storyline?

[Remotelawfirms]

There is a poetry competition and there is a story about 2 girls each claiming to have written a poem. The first line is in fact an Emily Dickinson 1st line. The teacher knows this and asks each girl to continue from the line “there’s a certain slant of light on winter afternoons”.
the amateur poem continues rhyming “noon” with “dunes”
the Emily Dickinson poem continues about cathedral towers.

please help - I was in “slanting light” on a walk with DH and telling him how influential this story was. 40 years later and I realise how much of my life it has shaped!

Wow, this was buried very deep in my memory! I must have borrowed the Trebizon book from the library back in the day. I still have the Blyton ones in the loft and re-read them all during lockdown!

Definitely Trebizon.

I still remember this poet off by heart https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7216359-the-thoughts-that-rain-their-steady-glow-like-stars-on Mathew Arnold - one of the rugby poets (leaned that from Jilly cooper when my reading material got a little more racy!)

The moral of the Anne-Marie episode according to Blyton appeared to be that Anne-Marie might have been technically "right" but nonetheless she had Used Dishonesty, and so had lost on points.

she was a terrible poet tho

It wasn't a Decent Thing to do, I think was the verdict of the Right Thinking St Clare's girls such as Hilary and the O'Sullivan twins.

Anne Marie also got a bollocking from Miss Theobald which left her sadder and wiser.

As per a PP I also downloaded all the trebizon series to my kindle a few years ago and reread often. They're a lovely bit of escapism for middle aged me. I also dreamed of being a tennis player so I think that aspect hooked me more than anything.

I dug out my old Mallory Towers set for DD a few years ago and they have NOT stood the test of time, although DD liked them well enough. I never got into St Clare's for some reason

I remember, Rebecca also once had greasy hair and felt a spot coming.

this is also the bit of Trebizon I always remember! How funny!

also the girl who was really good at tennis called ‘Virginia Slade’ (Er, like Virginia Wade??)

and the other thing is someone older (Robbie?) telling her about their Oxford entrance exam question (someone poisons a man’s drinking bottle but someone else shoots a hole in it and he dies of thirst: who is the murderer?) and she mulls it over for ages before finally working out the answer - showing that she is really clever!

High five Mrs LeBon.

but the writer carefully noted, as I recall, that her hair was blonde.

”her fair hair felt greasy”

not rubbish hair like mine was!

I remember nothing else but this is clearly where my bizarre tennis fantasies came from….

Ha, mine too. I remember telling my mum that I was going to try and play in Junior Wimbledon the next year because it seemed so easy in the Trebizon books.

It is Trebizon. Rebecca has been sent to the school unwillingly because her father has a promotion to Saudi. She is waving good bye to them and Elizabeth Exton sharply tells her not to lean out of the window. Exton's father, who is shady, has given money to the school so that the magazine can continue and magically his daughter is made editor. Rebecca writes a poem and discards it. Exton finds it and publishes it as her own.

You can get it on kindle. Am reading first chapter with my current year 8! They love it.

I have all the Trebizon books on my Kindle, I read them when I’m ill!

And then Elizabeth Exton comes back in a later book when she's working in TV and tried to make a documentary about how awful the school.

I remember this.

Rebecca Mason is the poet, with a little help from Emily Dickinson.

Elizabeth Exton is the plagiarist. She gets her comeuppance and is rusticated!

Elizabeth is baaaaad, because her father is a rough businessman who's poured money into funding the school magazine so his daughter can be editor. She's also bad because she's ill-qualified for the post, only got it because her rich daddy put the school under moral obligation, and another girl would have made a much better editor.

The first half of the Trebizon series was great, but some instalments did get increasingly silly as the series progressed. The first book, where the puny Juniper Journal and the younger Year 2 girls take on the mighty editor and plush, professional Trebizon Journal is one of the best. The stakes couldn't be higher and we're all rooting for the underdog, knowing the loser will be shoved out of the gates of Trebizon and left to the terrible mercies of state education ...

Gwen has spots in Malory Towers. It's a sign of her moral turpitude. If she'd just pull herself together and start liking lacrosse, her skin would clear right up, no doubt.

yes definitely Trebizon. I loved those books...> wanted to be Rebecca but I had brown hair a d a I'm hopeless at tennis

Yeah, go Anne Marie! IMHO the silly, shallow Miss Willcox got her rightful comeuppance.

But Anne Marie was vain of her talent. Bad! Obviously, punishment must ensue.

Apparently, her poems are awful because they're full of polysyllabic words, 'pretentious' metaphors (it's poetry FGS!) and complex poetic technicalities whereas it 'should', in Blyton's view, be about beautiful feelings.

T S Eliot must have been turning in his grave.

For sure. No Blyton adolescent girl in the whole scope of her profolic output has ever had a period!

I remember a Swedish student in Trebizon who wore a bikini on the beach and was told off by the headteacher for it. Tish’s brother Robbie had a crush on her and Rebecca was jealous.

And Rebecca had a bit of a girl-crush on older girl Pippa Fellowes-Walker, an artist who painted her when she was relaxing after playing tennis.

Funny the stuff you remember. I last read these in around 1985.

I loved Trebizon. I’ve got them all on my kindle - they are ultimate comfort reading. The friendship between the Six and the different personalities and loved the idea of the boarding houses in third year upwards. But I was so disappointed with hockey when I finally got to play it!

PMSL at Antoinette and the "anchovy toast".

It's hard to know whether "Golden-haired Angela" or Miss Wilcox was worse, really.

And PMSL at Gwen's moral turpidude and spots, @Marsyas. Doesn't she end up having to do a secretarial course because she quite reasonably lies about having a heart condition in order to get out of Games?

Classic fiction.

Let's not forget Alma Pudden, who naturally was fat because she was greedy and stole from the supplies for the midnight feast. I think she might have had small eyes too.

“shoved out of the gates of Trebizon and left to the terrible mercies of state education”

does anyone remember the girl with 5 siblings who gets a letter explaining why she has to leave the school because her parents can only afford 5 sets of school fees? “Daddy and I have decided it should be you”. That made such an impression on me. Is it one of the twins at St Claire’s?

@SerafinasGoose I was a Malory Towers/St Clares girl, so don't know much about Trebizon - but there's a character called Jo Jones in Malory Towers who is taken on as a bit of a project by Miss Greyling, and who steals money from the other girls and hides it in her knickers. She is then removed by her father, "Cheeky Charlie" (just in case we wondered about his social class), in disgrace.