What would you do with the relevant incident? I’m not sure it’s a call I can easily make.īut enough of editing and of nerdly niggles, and back to this wonderful book.

And whilst I’m so very conscious of that, I’m equally conscious of the necessity to understand the needs of current readers and different sensibilities. It was so dramatic to me, so gobsmackingly awe-inducing, precisely because of the slapping. I don’t know if there’s a right or wrong decision to this incident, but I’m conscious really of how I read the original incident when I was a child. I’m struck, really, about the tone of editing here. It’s worth nothing that, in the edition I read, the slapping incident between one pupil and another now involves shaking, though the attempted drowning beforehand remains curiously intact and unedited. It’s unafraid, unabashed, unrelenting storytelling that’s equally terrifying and equally addictive. There’s something quite brilliant about her when she gets like this. Blyton can write and she can give story, and she will give you story whether you want it or not. This is story, handed out wholesale, and it’s great. There’s not much artifice here, no narrative dodging or sleight of hand. Blyton can write, she writes with what I can only describe as a ferocious readability. It is an acclimatisation full of pitfalls, of temper, and of high-jinks and of friendship, surprisingly, enduringly formed. It’s Darrell Rivers’ first term and, as is the way with the school story, we follow her on her journey into acclimatising into her brave new world. A central court with a sunken theatre, roses, and Arcadia found. A swimming pool that’s crisp and refreshing on the hottest of days. It’s a school set nebulously on the Cornish coast somewhere, but the detail is what makes this school sing.

First Term at Malory Towers by Enid BlytonĪnd so my Blyton marathon reaches another great classic, her series of school stories set at the deliciously described Malory Towers.

Malory towers first book