Recently, I was revisiting books I used to love as a child, and I came across Enid Blyton’s school stories – St. Clare’s and Malory Towers. As someone going to an all-girls school myself, I used to wonder why my school couldn’t be like the two I used to read about for hours at a time. Yet, I found myself more drawn to the girls in the stories, and even today, they seem as girls and women I would admire, had they been real.
Where I come from, the conventional narrative about boarding school is that it’s a punishment for naughty children. Yet, I looked forward to it, and even wrote school stories of my own, where I was a student going on her own adventures. Indeed, when I changed schools and moved to a dorm in Grade 11, I didn’t even feel homesick after the first night.
But it was the girls in the stories I remember the most: their likes and dislikes, their talents (or lack thereof), their flaws and eccentricities, the women they grew up to be. These were English girls living in 1940s England, yet they felt more real to me than many other female characters I see today.
Darrell Rivers, from the Malory Towers series, grew up to be a talented writer, along with being head girl and a well-rounded student. She seemed to break stereotypes on her own: she played sports, she wrote plays, she could do well in class with a little work. More than that, she had her flaws, and they were not mentioned once and forgotten, but brought back to our memories every so often across books: Darrell struggles with a hot temper, and can’t play the fool while maintaining her grades. Even if I don’t know her favourite colours and dishes, I know her as a girl who lives life to the fullest, taking every chance she gets to become a better person. To me, a ten-year-old with big dreams, Darrell was a girl I would have loved to meet, and a student I would definitely admire.
Sally, Darrell’s best friend, starts off as a quiet, “wooden” student who has a strange bitterness and secret, but by the end of the series, she is a dignified, hardworking girl who is as well-rounded as Darrell, her best friend. And yet, her flaws are not forgotten either: she gets jealous easily, and feels a prick in her heart when she sees people she loves being ‘taken away’ by someone else. It’s something I have felt too, when I thought my friends were paying attention to someone else, and I have struggled to conquer it for a long time. But Sally’s steadiness and diligence was also something I wanted to emulate, and she was a friend I dearly wanted when I had none of my own. Even now, I’d love to have a chat with her over tea.
St. Clare’s was the first series I read, well before Malory Towers; the girls in this book were much older than me, but even so, I loved getting to know them. The twins Pat and Isabel O’Sullivan were not protagonists I liked at first. They seemed quite stuck-up and ungrateful for much of the first book, and I didn’t understand why they wanted to make things so difficult: it would only hurt them. Years later, it made sense: like them, I didn’t like some of the changes that were happening in my life, and I was too young and powerless to do much about them, so all I could do was behave a certain way in order to feel like I was in control. That’s what the twins did too, and fourteen isn’t exactly an age when change can often be fun: it’s an age where you’ve had some steady experiences, and you’re used to a certain kind of life. Change leaves you insecure and desperate to cling on to something so that you stay in charge (or think you do). I’m a lot more sympathetic to the twins now, even if I still don’t agree with what they did.
Perhaps one of the characters I understand best now, as a college student, is “Don’t-Care” Bobby Ellis. She was at a good school, and was quite good at her lessons and at sports, but was only interested in playing tricks and having fun, earning her the nickname “Don’t-Care Bobby”. After some pretty bad wake-up calls from the games captain and the headmistress, she turns over a new leaf and actually begins to work. The headmistress told her she was cheating her parents, the school, and herself by not taking advantage of the facilities the school had to offer, and this leads to so many missed opportunities for them all.
In the same way, there are times when I just want to have fun – I want to watch videos all the time and chill out in class, skip lectures and sleep when there are talks and events. But that’s just me cheating myself, my parents, and my university. There’s so much the university has to give me, and so much more I can give back. So why not take advantage of it? That’s what I’m trying to do now. I’ve joined some more clubs, and attended more events and talks this year, and it’s been worth it so far.
The girls of Malory Towers and St. Clare’s inspired me as a child, and sometimes I still wonder what they would do in my situation. Sometimes, there’s something so universal about their circumstances and personalities that even decades later, I can understand and connect to. To a little girl with big dreams, these older girls were the role models I needed, and the inspiration that pushed me forward.
Edited by: Priyanka Shankar All images are curated by Viraj Malani.