Goodbye Malory Towers

Goodbye Malory Towers by Pamela Cox is a boarding school story for 9 year olds, and it is the very last term.

What happens

Felicity Rivers is Head Girl and she leaves in the summer. University next, with Susan, who she says she could not possibly be separated from.

The sixth form have already sat their Higher Cert. They were rather hoping for a gentle few months to finish on.

Miss Grayling has other plans. There will be special classes in deportment and etiquette, the sort of thing you would get at a finishing school, and everyone has to attend.

Then the Head drops the real news. The new mistress is Miss Gwendoline Lacey. Gwen. The girl who was, as Miss Grayling puts it very carefully indeed, not the most popular of pupils when she was here.

Felicity now has to work out how to tell June.

There is a new girl as well. Lizzie Mannering has been moved up from the fifth a term early because her work is so far ahead of everyone else's. She arrives and tells the sixth form how mature and sensible they all seem. June takes roughly two minutes to decide she cannot stand her.

What it feels like to read is gossip. Lovely, harmless, extremely detailed gossip. Who has had her hair cut. Who is not coming back. Which two have gone off to music college instead. Whether Matron means it when she says she will be glad to see the back of them all (she does not).

The girls are properly sharp with each other and then properly kind about it five minutes later. Alice sticks up for Lizzie because the others once gave Alice a chance when she had not earned one.

A word before you hand it over though. This is the end of a long run and it does not stop to introduce anybody. Ten girls are named in the first chapter and the book assumes you already know which is which. A reader coming to it cold will spend a good while working out who Bonnie is and why June is like that.

The language is properly old fashioned too. Good hols, awfully, I say, isn't it grand. Some children love that and some bounce straight off it, so it is worth a look at a page together first.

What to read next

If they have not been to this school before, start at First Term at Malory Towers. Darrell Rivers arrives with a trunk, a tennis racket and a ten shilling note to last the whole term, hoping very much that she makes a friend. Felicity is her little sister.