The O’Sullivan Twins

Enid Blyton's The O'Sullivan Twins is a boarding school story for 9 year olds about a spoilt cousin, a sulky new girl and a school that has no patience with either.

What happens

Pat and Isabel are heading back to St Clare's for the Easter term. This time they're taking Cousin Alison with them.

Alison is very pretty and extremely aware of it. Rose-bud mouth, big blue eyes, and she has had her hair PERMED, which the twins consider absolutely shocking. Their father reckons he has never seen anyone so spoilt in his life.

Here's the lovely part. Pat and Isabel were exactly like that a year ago. Everyone called them the Stuck-Up twins. They had a miserable first term and they cheerfully admit it was entirely their own fault.

So they get Alison to stay for a couple of days beforehand, mostly so they aren't saddled with a silly cousin all term. Then they spend the visit winding her up about having to clean shoes and make tea and toast.

(Half true, that. The first and second formers really do wait on the top-formers whenever they're shouted for.)

Then there are two new girls on the platform. One is small with dancing black curls and a famous painter for a father. The other is tall and sulky with a bad-tempered face, standing on her own. Nobody has come to see her off.

The twins take one look and decide they don't like her. Which is rather the point.

It's comfortable and gossipy and quite funny. Trunks with names painted on in white. Tuck-boxes. A form mistress who's perfectly decent unless you get on her wrong side. A French teacher the girls call Mam'zelle Abominable, because she writes abominable across everything. And a Matron who has been there so long she dosed their mothers, and who always knows when there's been a midnight feast.

A word about the unkindness. A good deal of this book is girls deciding they don't like somebody and then saying so out loud. The twins write off the new girl in about four seconds, entirely on the strength of her face. Alison gets picked over for being vain. The book is plainly heading somewhere kinder, and it's gentle stuff next to a modern school story. Still, if your reader is in the middle of something like that at school, a few of these pages might land closer to home than you'd like.

This isn't the twins' first term and the book tells you so on page one, so nobody arrives confused.

What to read next

For a different school and a girl starting from scratch, First Term at Malory Towers sets Darrell down in Cornwall in a brown uniform with an orange ribbon, hoping very hard she'll make a friend.