Endsleigh Salon update

Endsleigh Salon last night and thankfully the snow-blighted January theme of School or Campus had been held over until February, the log fire in our salon room crackled away nicely and I'll report back on everyone else's choices soon.
My own reading plan was simply spiffingly top hole....as they say.
I was an Enid Blyton Malory Towers girl, no question. Darrell and I would have been best friends, we'd have shared tuck boxes and got stuck into the pillow fights at the midnight feast, scored the winning goal as a one-two-one-two bit of passing down the hockey pitch and generally I'd have been a jolly good all-round egg.
I can't imagine quite how offended my parents must have been at my insistent wish to be sent to boarding school but I can tell you it would have made my day.
Imagine the thrill of being taken to the shop and kitted out with the uniform and being put on a train on my own with my tuck box and sent away with a load of strangers?
How on earth did Enid Blyton convince me that this would be preferable to the warmth and happiness of my lovely family, Saturdays out on my roller skates and home in time for the wrestling, the footie results and crumpets for tea, yes really, every Saturday without fail.
But could a lifelong loyalty to Malory Towers by ousted in my later years by a defection to Elinor Brent-Dyer's Chalet School?
Could I be a traitor and a turncoat and go and play for them instead?
No other school had ever wriggled its way into my affections as a child and now I wonder whether that was because anything written in the 1920s and 30s felt very old-fashioned to us in the 1950s and 60s. It was too recent, the era of our mums and it just wouldn't quite do, which is why I now see how Offpsringette was very half-hearted about joining my team at Malory Towers and got stuck into Point Horror instead.
I have several of the Chalet School books in the very collectable Girls Gone By editions which I'll admit might have been half the attraction this time around.

Doubtless I could have been tempted who knows where with a nice book, but I plumped for the first in the series The School at the Chalet and settled down to enrol.
My edition has a fascinating preamble of biography, history, and bibliography, maps and geographical locations cited in the series, old illustrations and dust jacket pictures, fan clubs to join and doubtless coach tours to book and all stretching to seventy pages which with great self-discipline I read first. A bit like knowing the school rules and the traditions before I pitched up with my trunk and all incredibly informative, because the fan base is huge and dedicated and they have done a vast amount of research into the books, sixty titles written between 1925 and 1970.
I had no idea having always classed them as books of the past, but not so.
So I conducted my experiment and I'll tell you where it's left me in a minute, but having drawn my conclusions I headed for the Children's Literature shelf.
I had picked up a few transcripts of papers given at children's literature conferences including one from 1998 entitled School Stories From Bunter to Buckeridge edited by Nicholas Tucker. An idle flick through the speakers and who do I find but Adele Geras, good friend of us here at dovegreyreader scribbles, writing about school stories and would you believe it, Adele was a Malory Towers girl too and had been analysing what made her love the books,

'...the problems were always solveable: the kind of thing that we could envisage ourselves doing. They had to do with personal relationships. This or that person had got too big for her boots; was cheating; was sucking up to teachers; was letting down her best friend ...all good gossipy stuff which girls love.'

Likening the reading to

'a rather guilty pleasure - of having no roughage to chew on in a book ...it's just like eating meringues all day long and comforting...because even then at the age of eight... we realised that we were well able to deal with tougher stuff than this...in other words the books made us feel a teeny bit superior.'

Adele also nursed the boarding school dream and hers became a reality which, as was to be expected, bore little resemblance to Enid Blyton's nirvana.
Before settling down to write her own school series The Tower Room,  Watching the Roses and Picture of the Night, Adele revisited Malory Towers

'I started it and gave up after ten chapters. This is the ghastly truth...I found it almost unreadable. The language was impoverished in the extreme, there were more exclamation marks than I could tolerate, the characters whom I remembered so vividly were cardboard cutouts...the whole thing was the most disillusioning experience.'

I can't tell you how relieved I am because the Chalet School ended in disaster after fifty pages and I was ringing home for someone to come and fetch me immediately and wait until you hear about one of the Endsleigh Salonistas who went off to the Abbey School with Elsie Oxenham ... poor girl ... Morris dancing.
Having demanded to be taken back to dear old Malory Towers immediately things sadly went from bad to truly awful for me too.
I'm with Adele on this one,

'I decided then and there to leave Enid Blyton well alone, and recall simply how much I used to love her works...Blyton is strictly for children, no grown-ups allowed.'