First Term at Malory Towers

Enid Blyton's First Term at Malory Towers is a boarding school story for 8 year olds, and it starts on the morning of the very first day.

What happens

Darrell Rivers is in front of the glass admiring her uniform. Brown coat, brown hat, orange ribbon, brown tunic with an orange belt. She thinks it's jolly nice.

Then it's a taxi, then London, then a whole train waiting at platform 7 with every carriage reserved for the school.

Her mother hands over a ten shilling note and says it has to last the term. Nobody in her form is allowed any more than that.

On the platform Darrell goes shy. The big girls all seem to know each other and look so grown up that she's sure she'll be terrified of them.

Then Alicia Johns takes charge of her, and Alicia is the best thing in the book. Bright eyes, a wild tongue and an opinion about everything within about four seconds.

She's already narrating the platform. Gwendoline Mary Lacey is clinging to her mother and wailing, and the mother is crying too, and Alicia explains exactly what that mother should have done instead (grin, hand over some chocolate, leave).

Then Sally Hope turns up on her own. Nobody came with her at all. Alicia takes that in her stride. Mothers are all different, she says, and some just don't come.

The school is a big grey building on a cliff above the sea, four towers, and a Court in the middle with a sunk circle of grass where they act plays in summer. The first form dormy has ten beds with white curtains between them and windows looking straight out at the water.

What's lovely is how enormous the small things are. Which desk you get. Whether you can plait your own hair. Whether the girl you've decided on as a friend already has one. Gwendoline brushing her hair a hundred times and losing count at fifty-six while the whole dormy waits.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Everything is jolly and gorgeous, ten shillings is proper money, and the book makes its mind up about Gwendoline in the first chapter and never really lets her off. Darrell has a temper on the way, and she's already deciding she'd like to slap Gwendoline for her airs and graces. Some children take all that as part of the period charm. Others find the pile-on a bit much.

What to read next

If that world suits them and they'd like another first day at another school, The Twins at St Clare's has Pat and Isabel arriving determined to be somebodies, which goes about as well as you'd expect.