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!

I remember the music scholarship/diabetes/trifle storyline. It seemed so important how they looked on the day: flaxen waves etc,

“Reading back the list of all these scenes makes me really realise how much of an effect the books had on my sense of what other people would/do think of me, even if they don't show it. I am sure I didn't realise at the time how much was actual bullying.”

exactly.

I think Gwen was given an unfairly hard time, ‘fond farewells’. She was insecure, hardly a surprise. Her mother was shown to be a flibbertygibbet. Darrell’s quite serious faults, ABH, :), pushing incident, free pass, as good egg & sporty.

Gwen actually restrained herself from hitting someone once (Darrell, I think) as she had been taught that a lady always kept her hands to herself.

Blyton's husband, Kenneth Darrell Waters, was a surgeon. Explains where Darrell got her ridiculous name from!

I'll take Gwen a million times over Darrell. She was the scapegoat who embodied every single negative quality of the separate St Clare girls, all rolled into one character. She's apparently beyond redemption, but is nowhere near as bad as some of the girls Blyton tries to make us identify with, and is bullied or excluded by everyone, not least the books' narrator. Actually, she's guilty of nothing worse than most of the other characters who are apparently so wonderful: vanity and underhand tricks (hardly alone there), cattiness (step forward Alicia), laziness and deceit (aka Bill), and an elevated opinion of her own talents (like practically every other girl there).

Darrell is both violent and a bully, who never beats up girls who can stand up for themselves (like Alicia) but always those who are smaller and weaker than she is. Her equally awful teachers still see her as this fine, upstanding character - because she always says sorry and is ashamed of herself afterwards) whereas really she's a cowardly thug.

Alica is an unmitigated horror. What a nasty piece of work!

Alicia is fucking awful. She threatened to put a spider down Mary-Lou's neck for no reason except to traumatise her, and yet when a spider ended up in ML's desk, everyone was totally outraged when Gwen suggested Alicia had put it there. I know Gwen did it, but why on earth was it so offensive to suggest Alicia had when she'd threatened to do far worse?

And here's something that always pissed me off. Daphne stole money and jewellery in the second form, setting off a chain of events that almost led to Mary-Lou's death, and got totally redemption because she saved ML. A few years later, Josephine Jones also stole money and she got expelled for it. Pity she didn't also end up endangering someone's life so she could make good, huh.

I admit I always did like Darrell as a girl's name, though.

Jo Jones was common though, so had it coming…Carlotta they accept though, exotic?

Who was the girl whose mother was a matron & whose undesirable brother, a fence (?), hung about in school grounds?

It’s actually the establishment writ large, still goes on in boarding schools, & if you are good at games & bring glory on the house you’ll be forgiven most things. ‘Strong women whom the world can lean’ but never mind which weakling they take down in process, maybe.

That was Eileen, in 'Claudine at St Clares'. The brother, Eddie, wasn't so much undesirable as a bit useless by middle-class Blyton standards, although in fairness she did make a great positive of the bond between Eileen and Eddie.

@OnAFrolicOfMyOwn ahh, yes, thanks.

I always liked the arty Lucy Oriel, I think..that’s what she was called. Even her name was cool, not Margery or Gladys.

Grayling/Theobald really knew the girls inside out, not so today. I wonder if true at time?

Grayling/Theobald really knew the girls inside out, not so today.

As with all the teachers, they assessed their characters just by looking at them and were always right, surprise surprise...

Love Trebizon! I remember Rebecca's poem that she won an award for!

Jo was nouveau riche, darling! The vulgarity! How dare someone climb the social ladder and take their place among the worthier people of society?

The 'common little circus girl' knew her place and was oh, so grateful to be allowed to go to school with The Worthy and learn how to be a little lady.

I really can't understand why I once loved these books ...

Reading from an adult perspective, Mr Jones - red faced, loud, inappropriate sweaty and driving erratically- was definitely on the booze most of the time.

I think that’s just what EB thought proles with megabucks were like — fat, thick-necked, can’t drive their mega-cars (not like those lovely surgeons), dropping their h’s, no manners, or, if female, spendthrift, overdressed and dropping in jewels, and liable to bang on about bathrooms and rose gardens.

Carlotta gets a pass because her father is upper-class (though he lost his mind and married a circus girl), the low-born mother is safely dead, and Carlotta can do cool stuff like acrobatics and bareback riding, and is exotic and half-Spanish so is practically a Picturesque Peasant.

Just like Claudine and Suzanne get away with cheating and lying and avoiding cold water and freckles because they’re French and ‘don’t have the same ideas of honour we do’.

Miss Grayling/Theobald (because they’re identikit Wise Headmistresses) is pretty appalling in terms of lack of confidentiality, though. The bit where she cravenly apologises to the governors/important parents at half term for Jo’s father’s manners and says having Jo at the school was an experiment that hadn’t worked is mind-blowing. What she’s saying is ‘Don’t worry, Jo won’t contaminate your daughters with her prole ways’.

@SerafinasGoose ah, akin to Barney in the R mysteries, Rilloby, Rubabdub, Rockingdown, etc

@TheDaphne EB’s first husband, airbrushed out of children’s lives, was indeed an alcoholic, PTSD post WW1 plus.

Indeed, & if they are ‘of use’, so much the better.

The 'common little circus girl' knew her place and was oh, so grateful to be allowed to go to school with The Worthy and learn how to be a little lady.

Her father was rich and well connected, so that helped. It was only her mother who was circus stock and she was dead.

Did anyone here read the Abbey Girls books? There’s a bit where wealthy Joan explains to younger Jen that one of the maids made a mistake because people of her class are poorly educated and ‘can’t think clearly’ - can’t remember the exact words but that bit’s a direct quote.

I read some other boarding school books but I can't remember the titles. There was a teacher they called Dotty and a teacher or older girl they called HP Sauce. A Scottish girl who very firmly corrected anyone who didn't realise that things were Scotch and people were Scottish. An antagonist called Gabrielle or Gabriella, and naturally they all suspected she was a bitch before they met her and were completely right...

Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

I think those were the Susan books - Susan was Scottish, lived with her cousins Charlotte, Midge and Bill, Gabrielle and Peregrine were their hideous neighbours. I only had Susan Rushes In, which introduced Gabrielle and her awful family, and I think Susan’s Helping Hand, which was something to do with a mysterious letter, neither of which were set at boarding school, but there were some boarding school ones.

It is too. Just found this at http://www.collectingbooksandmagazines.com/shaws.html

Susan at School (1958)
Yet another transfusion of new ideas makes this Susan story one of the most entertaining of the whole series. Jane Shaw has the opportunity to create delightful new characters and to show her readers again that wonderful barrier that descends between the world of adults and the world of adolescents when they enter a school environment.
Witness Midge’s catalogue of some of the teachers in Saint Ronan’s – “Miss Johnson, who was about ninety years old and as mad as a coot and took them for Latin – she was called Dotty for obvious reasons …… Miss Ferrier, who was known as the Ferret and who taught maths – everything about her was sharp, her voice and her tongue and her nose.”
Best of all there’s fellow new-girl Tessa whose brain “wasn’t of the lightning variety” who becomes the indomitable Susan’s next project. She still finds time to help Gail Martin:
“Gail Martin had specs which Susan took to cleaning every morning after breakfast – she sometimes wondered how Gail had managed before her arrival; she must have seen everything through a sort of fog.”
We won’t bother outlining a plot but there’s a mysterious map and a runaway car and an exciting gameof hockey. But it is the doom-laden Tessa whom we most look forward to meeting again.

I do remember ‘Susan Interferes’ which is set on holiday somewhere near Lake Lucerne and which involves a highly improbable subplot concerning mysterious strangers and clandestine passport deliveries. Jane Shaw’s style is refreshingly witty in comparison to Blyton and Brent-Dyer - I laughed out loud at some of these quotes. ‘Everything about her was sharp, her voice and her tongue and her nose’. 🤣🤣🤣

My Susan books got lost in a move but they were wonderfully daft.

I always identified with Midge, who would happily spend all day lying around with a book & let Susan get on with having the adventures.