What children’s stories tell us about our values (2)

Malory Towers and wanting to be a brick

The view I imagine from Darrell River’s dormitory window.

This is part two of a series about children’s stories. You can find part one here. I kicked us off with this reasoning:

The philosopher Alastair Macintyre believed that it is only in becoming more aware of the narratives which shape us, and which we tell in our turn, that we can both understand ourselves and know how to act. We are, in his phrase, a “storied self”.

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What is it about boarding school stories? Given the proportion of the population who actually go to them (less than 1% in the UK) they are the setting for a disproportionate amount of our most loved children’s books. I’m sure a lot of it is related to another frame that shows up everywhere: a protagonist who is an orphan. Authors have to get parents out of the way somehow. This fact makes me a bit wistful. Now I’m a parent I want to be present for my kids adventures, participate in them even, but I know that isn’t how it works. I cannot think of a great children’s book which was primarily about the relationship between a child and their parent, or one in which great adventure happens with parents around. Children have to sail off to an island, or at the very least have a shed they can meet their secret society in for a great story to unfold. Parents, in the children’s literature canon, are little more than scenery. The safe harbour from which they leave and (we hope, want to) return, not passengers on the voyage. Maybe it’s that adults have a tendency of sucking the air out of a room, their disproportionate power inevitably driving the plot. Boarding school stories especially allow a microcosm of society in which adults are relegated to walk-ons, and few things are more satisfying to a child’s mind.

Every bookish British woman I know grew up reading the Malory Towers books by Enid Blyton. They centre on Darrell Rivers, the daughter of a country GP, going away to school in a castle overlooking the sea in Cornwall. Much of the joy of the series is the setting. The girls swim in a natural pool cut from the rocks, play exotic sports like lacrosse, go for long walks along the cliffs and are always having midnight feasts. I remember my mouth watering with longing, reading about the sticky ginger cake and lemonade, and the thrill of revulsion at the idea of tongue sandwiches.

It’s only been as I’ve introduced the books to my own daughter that I’ve realised they are mainly about the development of character. Darrell, who is otherwise friendly and kind, arrives for her first term with a raging temper, liable to lash out at anyone who crosses her. A lot of her early arc is about learning to control it, to reserve her rage for real instances of injustice. She also harshly judges a girl called Sally, reacting against her surliness and melancholy, but later discovers painful family reasons for it. Darrell is ashamed and humbled, and they become best friends.

Book after book, the thread of the narratives centre on this process of growth. New girls join nursing all kinds of struggles. One steals purses in order to try and buy friendship, one cheats in exams, another sends bitchy anonymous letters, and another is so arrogant about her sporting prowess she nearly drowns swimming across the bay.

The school works it’s magic on them all. These are no harsh Victorian morality tales, in which bad apples more commonly met a gruesome come-uppance. The culture of the place instead invites them into something better, freer than their various forms of hiding. When their vices are exposed, they are met not with ridicule or shaming, but grace.

Miss Grayling, the headmistress, stands as a symbol of the Ideal Parent - warm and kind and crystal clear about expectations. She never takes a girls worst actions as her whole character, but calls out of them something better. She takes pupils other schools have given up on (not, admittedly arsonists, or cocaine addicts, or anything too gritty) and expects them to be capable of honesty, loyalty and friendship. And under her calm, quasi-divine gaze, they prove her right.

And this, I think, is why they have endured. They are not especially compelling books in many ways, pretty formulaic, with only a handful of memorable characters. When I revisited them with my daughter I expected to be bored, or worse, to cringe at all the ways they are out of step with our world. I thought the dodging of darker themes would annoy me, that the stiff-upper lip approach which thought a good game of lacrosse could deal with any hard feelings would seem unhealthy.

I was also expecting, frankly, racism. Many of of my favourite authors express views and perpetuate stereotypes that now make me wince (Dorothy L. Sayers, when it happens, being an especially painful example). Blyton is no exception, although that doesn’t happen as much in the closed, white, middle class world of Malory Towers as it does in her other books. The fat shaming of Gwendoline was the closest I got to itching for a red pen.

The main way they diverge from modern children’s literature is the norms they set, the things they imply girls should aim for. There doesn’t appear to be a concept of cool, or whatever we called it before that word caught on. The older girls who the “shrimps” (younger ones) get “pashes” on (crushes, essentially) are the ones who look after other people, use their talents and take responsibility. Darrell and her friends celebrate each other when they demonstrate courage and tell the truth. Sneaky, vain, mean behaviour accrues no social capital at all. The biggest compliment you can be given in Malory Towers is “you’re such a brick”, which seems to translate to “fundamentally decent”.

Ugh, as I write this, it is creeping me out. Why did I never long for a rebel to show up and lead them out into the proper teenage rebellion they should be indulging in, on a the back of a motorbike? Yet in the books it’s somehow not vomit inducing. It made me want to be a brick. It still does.

I am now glad my daughter is as obsessed with them as I was. I am raising her in a time when teenage girls have never been more fragile. The statistics about their mental health are frankly horrifying. Yes, the books contain no eating disorders, self-harm or gender dysphoria, and we will need to find ways to help her process and navigate all that too. But I am overwhelmed, as an adult, with Sad Girl Lit. Recent years have opened up necessary space to discuss the struggles of being a woman, for people to share about their mental ill health and tell stories of trauma. The bright world of Malory Towers could certainly do with some shading to feel more true. But this swing has left a generation of girls with two main models of womanhood - hot, thin, perky and polished like an influencer, or fragile, cynical and depressed. Given those choices, I want her to know Hearty Head Girl is an option, too. Frankly, I’d love Hearty Head Girls to take over the world. Wouldn’t it be lovely to be led by capable and no-nonsense women, with low-ego and an allergy to bullshit?

Fundamentally, I like that the characters in Malory Towers are resilient. This seems like a healthy story to tell ourselves. They have agency over their own growth, even as they (in today’s language) do work on themselves. They are not allowed to explain away their lies or bitchiness or selfishness with pseudo-psychology, but neither do they seem to get as stuck. As someone who hated PE and would always have much rather been curled up with a book, I can even now see the value in an outdoors culture. These girls are strong and deeply connected with nature. They are allowed space to be quirky, like Irene the pianist who would surely now be diagnosed with ADHD, or Bill the ”tomboy” horse-obsessive, without it having to become their whole personality.

I find Malory Towers a tonic. It reminds me of the kind of women I used to want to become, the virtues I unconsciously imbibed as worth striving for. I don’t want to be a manic pixie dream girl, or a Girl Boss or even a ‘millennial intellectual’. I want, it turns out, still, to be a brick.

What else I’ve been up to

1. I shared The Kind of People we Need at the End of the World, an essay about climate anxiety and character over on the Ekstasis substack, and it is is one of the pieces of writing I am proudest of. I quote

   Dougald Hine
   who if you are not currently reading you should be.

2. We are gearing up for the new series of The Sacred podcast, and it’s a good one. If you’ve not already subscribed, now is a great time.

3. I am learning to rollerblade, slowly and with much falling over (my centre of gravity is too high and I am very clumsy) but something about persevering feels important. It feels like what Darrell would do.

4. We gathered a group of twenty people in our community house who are interested in pursuing new-monastic influenced forms of living, to share stories and discuss ways forward. If you might like to hear about future developments around this (we are very much feeling our way), please let me know with a message.

Photo by Lāsma Artmane on Unsplash