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!

That's definitely not a MT/St Clares story. The twins have no other siblings, and the only one I can think of in MT/St C with lots of siblings is Bill, who has loads of brothers and keeps her horse, Thunder, at school. She then becomes BFFs with Clarissa, whom everyone else has ignored because they think she's a nobody with red hair and braces on her teeth (and she turns out to be the Honourable Clarissa Carter and gets rid of her braces, whereupon social acceptance is instantly conferred upon her).

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?

Not exactly. She lies about her heart to get out of her School Certificate exam, but is found out and has to take it anyway.

In the last book, she plans to go to finishing school, having eventually worn her father down on the subject, but then her father is taken seriously ill, so instead of going to the posh school she has to take an unspecified job.

That's Antonia Forest - The Cricket Term. It's Nicola Marlow, twin of Laurie.

Quite right! Poor old Gwendoline Mary. She ends up being a slightly reformed character, I think, as a result of her father's illness.

@Remotelawfirms that is Nicola Marlow in the Kingscote books by Antonia Forrest - Cricket Term. Bloody outrageous, to take one twin away from expensive boarding school and not the other!

ETA sorry crossed posts there @OnAFrolicOfMyOwn

There's a Trebizon plotline where Tish accidentally finds out their friend Sue is going to have to leave as her father's business has failed, so she spends the whole book trying to persuade Sue to go in for a scholarship. Was that it?

Are you sure that’s not in one of the ghost written extras? Written by Anne ‘Trebizon’ Digby, I believe. Never read them but I knew the others off by heart - don’t recognise that character/storyline at all.

Sorry, that was to@PostBoxErgoProperBox

Not to mention, in 'Peter's Room' Mrs Marlow sells the family jewels to buy ponies for herself and Ginty!

Genius! Thanks!

She did!

It was blithely written how her name suited her as she looked like a pudding, pale & lumpen.

It's hard to imagine I read those books & didn't consider that this might be even a little unacceptable ... 🥺

Aka Alma Pudding.

But she became quite well liked, compared to the joint head-of-form, Mean Elsie...

100% certain. I never read the ghostwritten extras - I was obsessed by Enid Blyton as a child and definitely didn't re-read the school stories when I was doing my O levels as stress relief

Bill (Wilhelmina) pals up with Miss Peters one night when Thunder has colic and Bill thinks he's going to die. Until then, everyone has been fed up with Bill for thinking about nothing but horses.

Oh hang on, was she in Felicity ‘weak ankle’ Rivers’ year?

Does anyone remember studying and trying to agree with Smug Darrell about Gwendoline whilst secretly identifying with Gwendoline?

”Darrell’s father was a doctor. He worked [insert approving text]. Darrell couldn’t imagine “standing up to him”.”

God, no, I never identified with Gwendoline.

Darrell was annoying though.

I liked the twins in St Clare's much better.

You’d better believe I would have been glued to that radiator with her, that school sounded absolutely freezing!

*HangingOver · Today 18:25

This happens more than once... someone in (I think) StC submits a poem called Despondency by Matthew Arnold as her own to catch out her English teacher who said all her poetry was terrible no matter what she wrote.*

OMG! I loved those books, have not read about them for years, and this brought back a vivid memory! Thank you!

Loved this book.

Op I am curious how it shaped your life?

Both degree and job!

Did English lit (so I too could be someone who “really knows their Emily Dickinson”.
became copyright lawyer (guess I wanted to be the head-reacher in the scene).

Does no-one else feel like the boarding-school books are the secret key to everything that happened later in their life?

I knew I didn’t like Enid Blyton when that story ended up with a punishment for the girl for being too clever rather than sacking the bullying and incompetent teacher for being an ignorant prat.

I love the Trebizon books and still have them all. I would have loved to go to a school like that.