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 loved Enid Blyton, Malory Towers, St Clare's, famous five.....
Like PPs I really wanted to go to a boarding school in a castle with a pool filled by the tide. I doubt I'd have fitted in though, I wasn't hearty enough for the Malory towers girls.
The description of Mam'zelle wandering round St Clare's in the middle of the night locking up "burglars" made me laugh though, I'd forgotten about that but it all came flooding back.

I loved the Secret Island the most. Her descriptions of the Island with it's caves, beach, tumbling stream, the willow house and the "bedroom" in the gorse bushes with the heather and bracken beds were wonderful, I was desperate to live on it when I was small.

I always wondered what the hell all the mothers did all day? The kids were all packed off to boarding school, there's mention of cooks (Joanna in FF) and gardeners. In MT and SC they rock up for half term (which always just seemed to be a weekend?) and then bugger off again, although the holidays and what they during aren't mentioned much - I think sometimes Sally spent half the holidays with Darrell and went off to school with them. In the famous five, they get home from a term at boarding school and head straight off on an adventure somewhere. Aunt Fanny, George's mother was doing what? her only child was never at home, Joanna the cook was making all the food and making beds. Aunt Fanny seemed to dither about making sure Uncle Quentin wasn't being disturbed and being ill. You'd think they'd have been a bit concerned that their kids were getting kidnapped or catching criminals every holiday. Finniston Farm always made me laugh - people had been searching for the lost treasure from the castle (and the location of the castle itself?) for centuries but smug know it all Julian and co found the whole thing after having a bit of a poke around for an afternoon.

I loved the way it was suggested that 12-13 year old Julian could be so intimidating that he could scare grown men.

Julian probably spends his time these days retweeting Nigel Farage and saying 'LEAVE MEANS LEAVE'.

@KimberleyClark Ah but they were usually working class men (criminals!) who were intimidated - Mr Stick in "Five runway together" springs to mind!

He's probably a junior Minister who thinks Boris was a Jolly Good Sort.

Darrell qualified as a doctor but packed it in when she met and married Dr Right. Their daughters duly followed in her footsteps at MT, but she was a bit baffled at the fact that they were allowed to watch Top of the Pops and hold discos. She is now one of those terrifying women who run Women's Institutes and bosses everyone else around.

No. Darrell went to uni, but she was an angry drunk and glassed someone on a night out in an argument over queue jumping at the bar. She got arrested and when the vice chancellor had a word with her about it, she headbutted him. She got expelled and now works shovelling manure at Bill and Clarissa's riding school.

Fucking hope so, anyway.

Thank you for sharing that. Poor Gwen! She just didn't understand. Even her chilblains were considered a character fault!

I've enjoyed people's memories of these books. I read them with fascination and horror; the fun of midnight feasts and "tricks" in French class vs the relentless obsession with Games. I remember Darrell describing paying tennis in the heat and then sprinting down to the pool for a dip as "heavenly", and being physically unable to empathise with girls who detested sports. I wonder if they influenced my instinctively not wanting to go to grammar school when I was offered the option; I just really disliked the idea of an all girls school.

That era of children's fiction relied on plot devices to remove parents (stationed in India, killed in a plane crash, at a convalescent home after illness etc) so the children made their own entertainment and went off on camping/caravan/sailing/ruined lighthouse holidays for weeks at a time. A university friend whose parents went through a traumatic divorce during her childhood dismissed them as unrealistic- I thought that was the point.

I remember it being said by the mistresses that while Alicia would gain admiration for her sharp wit throughout her life, she would get little real affection.

And that while she and her friend Betty Hill were the clever ones, they wouldn’t do a scrap of work at university and Darrell and Sally would come away with the honours.

For years I brushed my hair 100 times a night, because I read it in a book somewhere once that this is what you had to do. Does this mean it was from Mallory Towers, and not a style magazine 😯😂

There were also lots of girl on girl crushes in the school books

Alison in St Clare's moving from girls to teachers
Gwen to an extent
Bill/Clarissa relationship

Was Blyton acknowledging same-sex relationships at a time when it would have been taboo?

This made me laugh. The thought that you brushed your hair 100 times a night "oh I read it in Vogue" (or even Mizz magazine) when in reality it was from the Blyton style bible, Malory Towers 😂

The brushing hair 100 times a night was mentioned in The Naughtiest Girl books too. Kathleen, a girl with spots and greasy hair was told to brush her hair 100 times a night and stop eating sweets and she would be as pretty as Elizabeth.

I just can’t imagine that Enid Blyton was indicating tacit approval of lesbian relationships. She was famously riddled with so many snobberies that I just can’t picture her being chilled about something so taboo. You read of women, in fairly recent decades, getting a shock on their wedding night when they discover the penis and the mechanics of ‘lovemaking’ for the first time, so there must have been a lot of people for whom the idea of two women being in a sexual relationship would just never have crossed their minds.

‘Pashes’ on teachers or prefects seemed to be spoken of as a healthy thing that nice girls experienced, rather than making eyes at the gardener as the lower classes would have done.

But I could be wrong and maybe Enid was fully aware of same sex relationships and thought setting up home and business with one’s Great Friend was a jolly good idea.

I agree that EB wasn't actually endorsing lesbian relationships, she was too conservative for that. But I think she was a good observer of human nature and I think she wrote in some characters and dynamics she had seen around her without realising that she was writing in some lesbianage.

I really, really don't think she meant any references to lesbianism, much as I wish she did. She was just too conservative.

With that said, the stories are yours in your own head and your own fan fiction.

Not perhaps the most reliable source but the Wikipedia entry for EB mentions a possible same sex affair between her and one of the nannies she employed.

"Blyton's marriage to Pollock was troubled for years, and according to Crowe's memoir, she had a series of affairs,[99] including a lesbian relationship with one of the children's nannies""

I misread that as she’d had 99 affairs. Interesting about the nanny though.

Most books of that era are terrible when re read with adult, modern eyes.

I tell you which are terrible that I loved- Sweet Valley High. They are dreadful! Jessica is a bitch to her sister out of jealousy, their parents are hopeless. Jess breaks the rules all the time and they shrug.

Now they would use Jess as the cautionary tale, she'd be the druggy character or the pregnant teen.

Ha, ha - no, it's a citation I forgot to edit out😀

Multiple affairs including one with the nanny. Goodness me, Enid.

In biography's about her there are details that apparently she enjoyed a far better sex life with her second husband than the first. She did allegedly have affairs before they separated.

Ha! Yes it's a great read. But as an adult who works in dusty archives with the kind of dry old documents that fascinate Uncle and bore poor Diana to tears, the idea of old Lord Popoffsky's letters being of interest to anyone other than his family or of value even to a museum, strikes me as really comical. Going to all the effort of marking them up and creating elaborate plots to steal them gives an added layer of comedy to the novel for me!

The book where Barney eventually finds his absent dad is surprisingly emotional though, as is the funny scene where Snubby is chased downstairs by an unseen criminal in the dark and ends up hiding in a longcase clock.

There's a bit of war espionage in that book (Rubadub) too, with the submarine spying, as well as in the Nazi looting adventure and gun-runners hangout in the Adventure Series and theft of military planes from a remote airfield in'Five go to Billycock Hill'. As far as I remember most of this stuff is mentioned implicitly, along with vague talk of traitors, theft of scientific secrets and the kidnapping of scientists.

And what's this scheme of Uncle Quentin's to create heat, light and power for almost nothing? Is he messing about with nuclear?