Third in a series of reviews. Previously: Second Form At Malory Towers. Next: Upper Fourth At Malory Towers.
Contains spoilers.

A friend recently asked why I was persisting with my Malory Towers reviews “since they sound horrible”. Well, I decided to review two very different series - Malory Towers and Bond - for rather similar reasons. One reason is that they both constitute unfinished business from my childhood; another is that it’s amusing to see what I make of work intended for an audience that wouldn’t normally include me. A third is that both series are highly idiosyncratic, and strongly reflect their authors’ own peculiarities; it’s an interesting challenge to differentiate between genre and period conventions and authorial prejudices.

Third Year is probably most interesting for the last of these reasons. I’d been wondering, since starting this series, if Blyton would ever deal with puberty. Clearly, it would be unreasonable to expect her to deal with the subject with Just 17-style frankness, given her audience and vintage. (And if she had, it’d probably make the books far too creepy for me to read, much less review). But on the other hand, what’s the point of a chronological series if the girls don’t ever grow up?

Darrell and her friends are fourteen as the book opens, but Blyton sidesteps any direct mention of adolescence by dealing with its signifiers rather than puberty itself. The book essentially tells parallel tales of the ambitions of four very different girls, and what becomes of them as they pursue their dreams. Blyton is clearly flexing her authorial muscles: as well as this radical new structure, she also gives her central characters an extra dimension this time round. (Admittedly, that still makes them only two-dimensional, but it’s a start).

The weakest, dullest and least contentious of the four plotlines is the straightforward cautionary tale of Mavis, who is fixated with her (genuine) vocal talents to the exclusion of lacrosse, French and other critical Blytonite skills. The other girls are quick to put a dampener on her dreams of becoming a kind of proto-Charlotte Church at an upcoming talent show:

“It’s just a silly show put on to amuse the people of Billington! ... Can you honestly see Miss Grayling allowing Malory Towers’ girls to go to a thing like this and make themselves cheap and idiotic?”

Mavis, heedless, heads off on her mission to entertain the ‘umble folk. Of course we know perfectly well by now that it is Not Safe Outside. Only the School is Safe. The School. Nothing can happen to you if you only stay in The School. Sure enough, the journey ends in disaster, and Mavis pays a disturbingly high price for her hubris. That’ll teach her.

Mavis isn’t the only girl to have arrived fifty years too early for the X-Factor. Zerelda, a ludicrously named American import, thinks she’s going to be an actress. And that means she’s fixated with her appearance: why, she has Long Blonde Hair — which, as Gwendoline and Daphne have proven in previous books, is a sure sign of Trouble — as well as perfect nails, rosy cheeks and suspiciously red lips. Or to put it another way, she’s a bit like a teenage girl. And obviously, being American, she talks funny, has no idea of propriety and is poorly educated.

Naturally, everyone instantly realises that Zerelda is a bad ‘un, despite the fact that she’s almost always described as easy-going and good-humoured, and suffers considerable indignity with a good grace. Her sins are her vanity and tendency to judge by appearances — the latter being a bit rich, since that’s exactly what everyone at Malory Towers does to her: girls and teachers alike find her deeply threatening.

Zerelda never seemed to take offence, no matter how often anyone laughed at her or even jeered … She made the others feel small and young and rather stupid.

Like white blood cells swarming over an microbial intruder, the other occupants of Malory Towers rally to neutralise and transform her into “a nice little schoolgirl” like all the rest. (This has particularly weird undertones given that Zerelda’s actually nearly sixteen.) In any case, Zerelda’s ambitions turn out to be ill-founded. (The drama teacher tells her that actors have no ego or fondness for theatricality. Yeah, that sounds about right.) And once her spirit has been crushed, she scrubs down accordingly.

Zerelda’s treatment contrasts starkly with that afforded to Wilhelmina, another of the newcomers. Wilhelmina, under any objective assessment, is actually much more disruptive and badly behaved. But that’s alright, because she’s … uh, well, she’s basically a boy. She even prefers to be called Bill. But all the girls warm to her immediately, because, well, she’s a boy. But not in a dreamboat Cory way, obviously, more in a huntin-fishin-shootin way. Which is what all girls should be like. Boys, that is.

To make matters more complicated, Bill is horse-mad, which is quite neat, because it allows Blyton to shoehorn in an equine subplot, augmenting Third Year’s already considerable girl-appeal. But then, the writing also invites a reading in which Bill’s horse-madness presages boy-madness to come, as she spends much of her time day-dreaming about Thunder in class, mooning over pictures of him, sneaking off for illicit rendezvous, writing out her married name … Well, maybe not the last, but:

He was lovely, the way he welcomed Bill … showing her as plainly as possible that he adored every bit of his freckled little mistress.

Hopefully not really as plainly as possible, or there’ll be some awkward questions for Matron. So that’s Bill, the girl who’s a boy who likes a horse that’s a boy. Blur had nothing on this. But this blossoming romance fails to follow the conventional track - Thunder dumping Bill, who takes revenge by feeding sugarlumps to a much nicer stallion at the youth club disco - and instead opts for a more veterinary course as Thunder gets stomach-ache but is saved by an emergency application of purgative (thankfully off-camera), which wouldn’t make for much of a photostory in Jackie. Anyway, the upshot is that Bill learns a lesson, but (mostly) gets her way.

The fourth girl to get a close-up is, of course, Darrell Rivers, Enid Blyton’s alter ego in the Malory Towers books. This time, Darrell’s friend Sally is out of the picture for much of the book – quarantined, as is Alicia’s bosom buddy Betty. So Darrell and Alicia form a marriage of convenience – a cynical partnership that seems to have little to do with actual friendship. And as in First Term, all are very clear that there is only a fixed quantum of amity to go round:

Sally didn’t like Alicia and wanted Darrell’s entire friendship. Alicia didn’t see why she should give up Darrell’s companionship completely just because Sally had come back. Why not a threesome till Betty returned?

Why not indeed. (Stop sniggering at the back.) Binary friendships are once again the order of the day, except for poor old Gwendoline Mary, who has been reduced to being traded to and fro among the glam set, presumably for a pack of cigarettes and some nylons. Anyway, Darrell’s story is pretty simple: she wants to be on the lacrosse team and by dint of perserverance and hard work, she gets there.

That sets the scene for a pretty classic school-story ending, as Darrell wins a critical match and the girls unite to praise her — including the three mavericks, who have by this time learned that resistance is futile and settled into their new lives as Borg drones. But this reader felt somewhat cheated: I was hoping for a climactic scene in which Darrell’s explosive temper leads her to leap clawing upon Zerelda, screeching “You painted whore!”, before Bill whisks her up to sit behind her on Thunder, and they ride off into the sunset. But alas, that’s not how it goes. Maybe next time.