Fun & Games at Malory Towers

Pamela Cox's Fun & Games at Malory Towers is a boarding school story for 8 year olds about three new girls arriving in the fifth form at once.

What happens

Felicity Rivers and Susan Blake are going back to school feeling very grown up indeed. Fifth formers. Dignified. Far too responsible for leaping out of a car and running across the lawn, however much they want to.

June is a fifth former too, which is going to be a problem, because June's whole personality is jokes and tricks and that sort of thing is now quite out of the question.

The first new girl arrives before they even reach school. Millicent Moon is tall and serious and announces in the car that music is her life. She plays the piano, the violin, the harp and the flute. She hums a new tune out of nowhere and has to stop everything to write it down.

Felicity and Susan pull faces at each other behind her back. You will probably be on their side at first. Then Millicent finds a newspaper article about a competition for the best school orchestra in the country, and suddenly she has a plan that could put Malory Towers on the map.

The second new girl is Delia Norris, whose night case falls open on the driveway and spills everything across the grass. Delia says sorry a lot. She says she's a duffer about five times in her first evening.

And that's the bit that might catch your reader. Delia lives with an aunt who isn't kind to her and cousins who never made her welcome. Her mother has died and her father is away at sea. It's all said plainly in the first chapters, not sprung on you later, and it's said in Delia's own cheerful, apologetic way, which is somehow worse. If you've got a child who feels things on other people's behalf, expect some feelings about Delia.

The rest is proper term-start pleasure. Trunks and Matron and health certificates lost inside a slipper. Girls who bring their horses back to school with them. Everyone deciding who ought to be head of the form.

It is an old-fashioned read and it sounds it. Hallo, jolly, my goodness, good hols. Most children take about ten pages to stop noticing.

What to read next

Nine other Malory Towers books sit in the library, and this one comes a long way down the line. Felicity is Darrell Rivers's younger sister, and Darrell is the one the story starts with. For the beginning of all this, try the book where Darrell arrives for her first term, with the brown uniform and the orange ribbon and a ten shilling note to last her.