A station in London: excited children gather for the “special train” to a remote boarding school that looks like a castle. Not the all-conquering school series of the present era, Harry Potter, but the opening chapter of Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers books, set on the Cornish coast and published between 1946 and 1951. These six short novels have been adored for nearly seven decades, with a further six titles by Pamela Cox added in 2009 – last year they sold 350,000 copies in English alone. Now comes a book of four new stories by contemporary children’s authors, with a BBC series in development, while later this month theatre director Emma Rice, fresh from her adaptation of Angela Carter’s Wise Children, will stage a musical version.
Blyton characterised her school stories as dramatising “the little spites and deceits of school life, the loyalty and generosities of friendship, and the never-ending impact of one character on another”. The psychology of the girls is blunt, but accurate, and while they may be archetypes, they are memorable ones. Heroine Darrell, whose androgynous name was borrowed from Blyton’s second husband, has flaws many of us might be glad to own: hot-headed bravery and a forthright temper. Clever, confident trickster Alicia needs to learn that life doesn’t come so easily for everyone. There’s steady, sensible Sally, who wrestles with jealousy; scatterbrained musical and artistic geniuses Irene and Belinda; horse-mad Bill; shy Mary-Lou; and of course spoiled, shallow Gwendoline, perhaps the only girl on whom Malory Towers’ magic – “the longer you stay here the decenter you get” – won’t work.
Blyton has long been disparaged for her clunky prose style, always responding that she took no notice of critics over the age of 12. Some of her work also displays xenophobia, racism and a snobbish little-Englander sensibility, and has been rewritten to smooth over dated attitudes or vocabulary. Malory Towers is less vulnerable to such accusations; unlike the Famous Five or Secret Seven, it doesn’t feature groups of middle-class youngsters roaming the countryside harassing “foreigners” and demanding bread and jam from farmers’ wives, but girls coming of age together as they work out their collective moral code. Every book begins with the same rousing speech from headteacher Miss Grayling, encouraging pupils to grow into “good hearted and kind, sensible and trustable, good, sound women the world can lean on”.
New Class at Malory Towers takes Blyton’s time capsule and introduces the kinds of characters it wouldn’t have occurred to her to write about. It begins with Patrice Lawrence’s story of Marietta, a black girl whose parents are part of a travelling circus: she unwillingly joins Darrell and the others, nursing trauma and a secret. Gwendoline, of course, is desperate to touch her hair. Lucy Mangan explores Darrell’s new friendship with a “bookworm”, the kind of girl who doesn’t fit in with the sports-mad, gung-ho spirit of boarding school; her story challenges the bullying undertones of Blyton’s original. Narinder Dhami cleverly subverts the children’s book stereotype of an Indian princess, while Rebecca Westcott introduces a less privileged girl, to counter what she calls that “teeny little whiff of entitlement” coming off the pages of the original books. As a child, Westcott was a huge fan of the series, but it was “100% fantasy and escapism. There was as much chance of a girl like me, living on benefits on a council estate, going to Mordor.” Her character Maggie declares: “You all think that you’re something special just because you go to school here … It isn’t normal to have all your meals cooked for you and your clothes washed for you while you swan around the place, riding your ponies and sketching in art books.”
It wasn’t normal for Rice, either; she hadn’t read the Malory Towers books before producer friend David Pugh sent them to her six years ago with the suggestion that she make them into a stage show. Having blanked out her own schooldays at a “fairly unpleasant” Nottingham girls’ comp, she didn’t think she’d take him up on it – but the project remained “an itch she wanted to scratch”. Rice believes the time is right for a revival, not for reasons of twee nostalgia – that version of Blyton piled up on bookshop tables in retro-jacketed parodies of Famous Five books – but because of something “far more radical”.
The books were written, she points out, against the backdrop of a postwar Labour government focused on social equality, the rebuilding of society and the creation of the welfare state. “They offer such a sense of community and collective responsibility,” she says. “The girls are constantly deciding what they should do as a team and I think that’s amazing when we’re crumbling as a society that’s able to make collective decisions.
“There’s something about the spoken, named desire to be good that feels almost radical. Right now we are deciding whether it matters to us whether our prime minister is a good person. Blyton’s questioning of the rules is really interesting too – there are times where the girls decide to break them, and they are right to. Their moral compass is not an obedient one, it’s a compass that has integrity. You can find your way through bad behaviour and be forgiven. It’s a very live debate. I want people to feel like marching after they see this show.”
Rice has had to cut with abandon to compress six years of school into one night of theatre, dispensing with the adult characters and using animation to represent Miss Grayling (“she inspires awe in the girls and has great status. So with animation I can make her really big”). While she wants the show to feel a little like a 1940s musical – “that relief that the war is over, we can tap our way to happiness” – she stresses that “this is a piece made in 2019”, framed by scenes set in a contemporary school from which “we tumble back in time”. Original compositions will mix with 40s songs, to “let the voice of now bubble through”.
She has also whittled the number of girls down to seven, with a diverse cast: Darrell, Alicia and Irene aren’t white, and the actor playing Sally is of restricted height. “There’s not any reason not to have a diverse cast. My work is always from a storytelling background, which means anyone can be anything. They are bang on for their archetype.”
Rice felt it was important, too, to include the “tomboy” character Bill, “at this time where gender fluidity is such an interesting and important topic for young people. And Blyton writes it with such detail. She says: ‘Please don’t call me Wilhelmina, I shall not know myself if you call me by that name. Call me Bill.’ Girls aren’t usually allowed to decide their own nicknames, but the others realise how important it is. I’m certainly not suggesting Bill isn’t a girl, but I’m bringing contemporary discussions into the room.”
Mary Lou is included, as well as Irene (“she’s very neurodiverse, as they say – lost in her music and quite chaotic”) and the dreadful Gwendoline. “Dreadful and tragic. She’s such a troubled girl. We all knew them, and we all know them. I’ve given her a bit more, because she’s got the biggest journey to go through. And you need that, because otherwise everybody would be nice all the time.”
In 2019, Malory Towers doesn’t just feel radical for its moral certainty and lack of cynicism. Rice characterises her production as a “girl power” show, and the books are indeed a grand celebration of female friendship and potential. As she points out, pupils “pass the Bechdel test over and over again – they’re not talking about boys, they’re not thinking about how they look” (considering the recent pinkification of girls’ books, it’s striking how disapproving Blyton is of any princessy behaviour).
There are references to “pashes” in the books, and much discussion of whether friendships can work as a “threesome”. Will Rice be bringing out the undercurrents of desire? “I’ve just asked the sound designer to make me the sound of falling immediately in love with a friend – that ‘wow’ moment of a girl-crush. We’ve got our modern filter very clearly on, but I’m not going to push it. I think it will just happen. I hope there will be that dizziness. They are all intoxicated with each other.”
Rice has been watching Love Island with a keen eye to the cloistered passions of boarding school. “They’re also locked away from adult company, and they’re so young! I also think they’re very moral, even though they’re all in bikinis talking about sex. There are quite a lot of parallels – it’s a group of young people working out what they think is acceptable and what isn’t, and how they can keep the villa happy.”
In the final book, the girls wonder while scoffing biscuits in the common room if they can really be approaching adulthood when they’re still so teenagerishly hungry all the time. Alicia declares: “Long live our appetites! And may our shadows never grow less!” It shouldn’t sound so radical in 2019 to hear a young woman saying that – but it does. Rice beams. “I want that on a T-shirt. Our appetite for life, our appetite for knowledge, our appetite for food – may we own our place.”
• Malory Towers opens at the Passenger Shed in Bristol on 19 July, then tours the UK. New Class at Malory Towers is published by Hodder.
