feather_ghyll

The Secret of Grey Walls: Malcolm Saville Newnes (Seventh Impression 1972)

I haven't really written about the Lone Piners’ influence on me as a reader. Rationally, I know by now that the books and the characters' adventures don’t stand up well in comparison, but they were quite as influential on me as the Swallows and Amazons books growing up. I was probably reading them higgledy-piggeldy, along with various Enid Blyton books even before The Chalet School and before I was the twins’ age. I admired Peter tremendously, although I never wanted a pony of my own.

I owned an Armada paperback copy of The Secret of Grey Walls and bought this hardback edition to replace it at a reasonable enough price, because I heard that the Armada editions were abridged, which may or may not become a new habit. I found I didn’t remember much about the story – except it fits in with the pattern of the mysteries and adventures that Saville’s gangs of children happen across (I came across the Buckinghams later and the Jillies even later in life, which, along with their being smaller groups and having fewer books devoted to their adventures, made them less important to me than the Lone Pine Club,)

( Every member of the Lone Pine Club signed below swears to keep the rule and to be true to each other whatever happens always. (p 102) )

Noel Streatfeild news and resources:

Ballet Shoes to be made into a feature length drama to air on BBC One later this year - read the press release. I got the heads up from Digital Spy. This could be great, the BBC, after all, should be able to handle this sort of material in its sleep, but it rather depends on who they cast to play the Fossils and what the director gets out of them.

h2g2 has an overview of the 'Shoes' "series" (which was artificially created as such, though some of them are obviously connected, says the person who never could read 'The Bell Family', in fact I'm not sure if I didn't give up and give it away.)

For more, there's this well-presented Noel Streatfeild site: http://www.whitegauntlet.com.au/noelstreatfeild/

Discussion - girls in fiction and the women writing it

Girl wonders
As Nancy Drew returns to the screen, Laura Barton remembers the fictional female heroes who bested the boys, bucked convention and shaped her childhood

Were you an Ann or a George? (Plus, it may be made more explicit in later books, because, yes, I am of the Nancy Drew Files/strawberry blonde generation, but is Ned Nickerson not 'the love interest' and sidekick to Nancy? Sadly, there's no mention of the Swallows and Amazons girls in this article.)

Editorial anonymous, a children's book editor, discusses the question of whether children's books are a girls' club and if so why? This mainly refers to modern children's literature.

I recommend
Essay/Discussion: Twins, part two by sangerin, which focuses on the twins of the Abbey Girls and Chalet School series.

Malcolm Saville resources:

The Malcolm Saville centenary website, through which I discovered 'Three Towers in Tuscany' is the first of a sequel, which ends with 'Marston Baines - Master Spy'. My delight at the fact that there are more books and that one of them has such a title cannot be textually rendered.

Quizzes:

http://www.funtrivia.com/quizzes/literature/specific_subjects__themes/childrens_literature.html