Has anyone ever read Malory towers?

[Orangejelly1]

I used to love the books as a child! I read them cover to cover so many times and my favourite character was Darrell. I recently found my old collection and re read parts of them just for old times sake and I was actually really disappointed to see, as an adult, how awful some of the popular characters were. I know it was a product of its time and a different era, but Darrell, Alicia and some of the most popular girls would be called nasty bullies nowadays. I also felt so sorry for Gwen, which surprised me because as a child rearing the books she was my least favourite character.

just wondered if anyone else re read the books and thought this too!

I really recommend Terms & Conditions by Ysenda Maxtone Graham as a very readable social history of what girls boarding schools were like in the mid 20th century. Mostly completely chaotic, with very little academic merit, and often staffed by people who should have been nowhere near children!

More St Trinians than Malory Towers then!

Daisy pulls it off isn't really a send up of Mallory towers. It's a parody of the typical girls' school stories of the 20s.

Typicalky the heroine is seen as a lower class than the others but is able to go to school through a scholarship or similar.
They are immediately top of the classroom, amazing at sports and loved by all... Except the dreadful snob and her friends.
Then normally it's discovered at the end that she actually does have money and is really of the "proper" class because of something really likely like having been stolen by gypsies or father lost his memory. And the snob invariably loses their money allowing the main character to show their class by being terribly gracious.

I've got a few of my grant's books from that era and they're all like that.

I loved them all.

I found her attitude to unmarried women pretty nasty and judgmental.
Otherwise it was an interesting read.

I used to like the Adventurous Four books (only two of them) and also remember the Mistletoe Farm books.

When I was in primary school, my local library service had a reading scheme a bit like the Summer Reading Challenge, except that it ran all year round, and you read books, told the librarian about them, got points and eventually got rewards. Enid Blyton's books were excluded so clearly considered too low brow.

I have a couple of wildlife books that she wrote - one of them was about British animals, many of which are now endangered or extinct - I think it would be quite sad to read it now. There was another book called Enid Blyton's book of the year about a school with four (!) children in it, but there was a chapter about each season and they learnt about gardening and wildlife, among other things. I remember one of the children had a pet toad. It had a riddle in it, which I have never "got" and the answer isn't in the book!

@gatehouseoffleet The two adventurous four books are good. I think it is the only EB books in which she explicitly mentions WW2.

Do you have the riddle?

"Wunnerful" and "Twenny" was originally in Five Have Plenty Of Fun. Berta was the DD of an American scientist working with Uncle Quentin who was a kidnap risk and the five took it upon themselves to correct her whenever she pronounced a word "wrong" with much hilarity

Yeah I think she recycled it for Zerelda too.

I actually think if Zerelda had stayed on she’d have been a better bead girl than Darrell. She’s described by staff and students as being good humoured, plucky, generous, she has strength of character enough to take criticism on board and is a great friend to Mavis despite not especially liking her at first.

Also agree Mary-Lou would have - she’d loyal, sticks up for her friends, obviously kind hearted and selfless if she wants to be a nurse and has overcome crippling shyness and timidity

Even Sally would have been a better choice as again is loyal, hard working, and not afraid to go against popular opinion. Although she is also pretty dull.

What the hell did Darrell have to offer other than doing well in her School Cert and being sorry for having had a temper?

The O Sullivan twins were pretty dull yet we were meant to see them as charismatic characters and obvious choices as head girls.

They were boring af. Were they meant to be identical? If so, there could have been all sorts of antics around that but I don't think there were.

I only discovered the AF books a few years ago when I picked a few up at a jumble sale. They were amazing! I must reread them. I loved the one where a student didn't want to play Miranda but wanted to be Caliban because for an actress, it's a much better role. And it is!

Have you also read The Adventure Series? Think there are 8 of them. It's about 2 sets of siblings who always seem to be recovering from scarlet fever or measles or something, but manage to get involved in all sort of scrapes on random islands or castles. There's a shady character called Bill who ends up marrying the mother of two of them. And one of the boys has a parrot who is quite amusing.

Oh dear, that description does sound rather like the school I went to, particularly at the point when the new headteacher (who was rumoured to be found regularly under the table waving a bottle around) disappeared after a term. It was freezing cold in the winter, and the food was awful - with hindsight, I do wonder what my parents thought they are paying for. Some of the teachers were very good, but definitely not all, and the games teacher was utterly incompetent and fairly sadistic to boot. To be fair, it has dragged itself up now, done a hell of a lot of building, and I think is quite well-reputed if very expensive.

If I were Pamela's parents I'd be suspicious that the objective was to extract another year of school fees from us, and if I didn't want her to go to university early, I'd whip her out for a gap year

If she had any sense, she'd have turned it into a teaching opportunity around the fact that even good authors have their bad days, and you mustn't automatically assume a book or poem is good because you've heard of the author.

It could be that she owned the school and her heirs didn't want to carry on? Though it would be a pretty odd way to run things. Most people who bought schools would set up some sort of trust arrangement so they could continue after they died.

For some reason I never read any of the Adventure series, they completely passed me by. Most of my Enid Blyton books came from jumble sales, or my dad would buy me second hand copies if he saw them in bookshops. He found loads in Greene’s (RIP) in Dublin as I recall.

I loved the R mysteries, although they don’t seem to get mentioned that much. I must have read the Ring O’ Bells mystery at least 20 times. One of her best books, had a genuine creepiness to it.

I found the bedroom arrangements in the Antonia Fraser books odd, with mixed age school with some unfortunate 6th former in charge. It doesn't really seem workable with people going to bed at different times, and I must say when I was in boarding school I felt that by the 6th form I'd more than earned having a single room - I can't imagine anything worse than having to share with younger children. Also the concept of sisters' bedrooms - wouldn't it have been better for sisters to be able to share with their friends and contemporaries? Did/does any boarding school routinely have that sort of sleeping arrangement?

Sorry, mixed age rooms, not mixed age school.

Can never have too many horses 😁

*Wunnerful" and "Twenny" was originally in Five Have Plenty Of Fun. Berta was the DD of an American scientist working with Uncle Quentin who was a kidnap risk and the five took it upon themselves to correct her whenever she pronounced a word "wrong" with much hilarity

Yeah I think she recycled it for Zerelda too.*

And for Sadie in Summer Term at St Clare’s. And the obnoxious American tourist and his obnoxious son Junior in Five Go To Finniston Farm.

I loved the Trebizon books and also Famous Five, Mallory Towers, St Clares - living in a house full of boys I found myself reading the Pamela Cox series during lockdown.

I also loved the Sue Barton - Nurse books and Nancy Drew.

The Rilloby Fair Mystery was my favourite Barney R. It's full of a humour uncharacteristic of Blyton (though the Fatty Mysteries have that too). I love the way Snubby's crazy fantasy of the Green Hands Gang completely takes in the credulous Uncle Robert, but then becomes uncannily real, following Snubby for the rest of the story until he regrets ever having made it up.

My all-time favourite Blyton characters are Snubby and Loony, plus the Adventure Series' Bill Smugs.

In Malory I love Zerelda with her dyed hair, victory rolls, 'Lossie Laxton' style performance of Shakespeare's Juliet and unflappable, indomitable personality. She rocks! As for the breathless, insipid, goody-two-shoes Felicity, she is a FAR more annoying character than Gwen could ever aspire to be. I could cheerfully throttle her!

Even so she never mentions Nazis or Germans. The enemy soldiers on the island are described as speaking a harsh sounding language, the symbols on the seaplanes described as “the sign of the enemy, the foe of half the world.”

I think the War is also referenced in The Valley of Adventure? I'm sure the children's plane crashes into an Austrian Valley where they shelter with an old couple who hid treasure from the Germans? I loved the Adventure Books although I don't recall this one as much as some of the others

I liked the Secret books, The Secret of Spiggy Holes, The Secret of Moon Castle, The Secret of Killimooin.

Ah, The Secret of Moon Castle!

Prince Paul of Baronia.

At the start of the book one of the other character's mums has been given the job of finding a suitable castle for Prince Pauls' family to rent.

'Be a love and find us a nice castle. Nothing huge just 27 bedrooms'.