Storytime

by Jane Sullivan

  There is also a special Silent Three language which, like the plot, has much in common with Blytonese. Everyone talks in a slang which must have been stiff and antiquated even in the 1950s. The girls declare their pleasure with a barrage of Goody! Rather! Wizard! Scrumptious! Their astonishment with Gee whiz! Golly! Gosh! How jolly odd! By Jingo! And my favourite word, Whizzing! The plotters have their own lingo. They swear By Jakes! By Thunder! And a brave girl is invariably addressed as You Little Fool.

  Not long into my reading, my mind is busy boggling. How can there possibly be so many eccentric landowners or treasure keepers who have died and left their wills, deeds or vital possessions hidden away in bizarre places that can only be found through deciphering riddles on bits of paper? How can there be so many nice girls and nasty scheming rivals after these treasures? And how can there be so many people creeping about in robes and masks? Because it’s not only the Silent Three. Sometimes they lend a robe to the damsel in distress. In one story there’s another secret society at a boys’ school, the Grey Shadows. For one delirious moment I imagine schools up and down Merry England teeming with robed and masked figures, meeting in crypts by the light of candles to right wrongs. If they all got together and staged a revolution, they would surely make the country a better place.

  Or would they? Because these secret societies, transgressive as they are, are part of a larger society of entrenched privilege and wealth: the world of the public school, as it’s known in Britain, or private school, as it’s known elsewhere, and the desirably romantic version of this world that School Friend offers. Does this matter? George Orwell certainly thought it did. In a perceptive 1940 essay, he looked in great detail at the phenomenon of the popular comic papers, only his focus was on the English boys’ twopenny weeklies, such as Magnet and Gem, which featured the exploits of Billy Bunter and his chums, and more recent arrivals on the scene such as Wizard and Rover. He was perturbed to find that the school stories in particular all preserved this snobbish fantasy of a school and schoolboys that was decades out of date. ‘The supposed “glamour” of public-school life is played for all it is worth,’ he wrote. It is ‘a perfectly deliberate incitement to wealth-fantasy,’ aimed at ‘the sons of shopkeepers, office employees and small business and professional men,’ but also read by many working-class boys. There were two basic political assumptions: ‘nothing ever changes, and foreigners are funny’. The readers got what they were looking for, but they got it ‘wrapped up in the illusions which their future employers think suitable for them.’

  “these secret societies, transgressive as they are, are part of a larger society of entrenched privilege and wealth: the world of the public school, as it’s known in Britain, or private school, as it’s known elsewhere, and the desirably romantic version of this world that School Friend offers.”

  Orwell was sensible enough to concede that a left-wing paper for boys would be a dreary exercise in propaganda that no boy would actually want to read. But he thought there was a case for trying. People were far more influenced than they would admit by what they read, he wrote, and the worst books were often the most important, because they were usually the ones read earliest in life. ‘In England, popular imaginative literature is a field that left-wing thought has never begun to enter. All fiction… is censored in the interests of the ruling class. And boys’ fiction above all… is sodden in the worst illusions of 1910.’

  Popular fiction has changed a great deal since then, of course, but some of what Orwell says about boys’ weeklies is also recognisable in the girls’ comics I was reading. I wonder whether this insidious form of class warfare was having its way with me when I sighed over the heady attractions of St Kit’s or Island School. It was certainly anachronistic, even for the 1950s. Yes, there was an element of ‘wealth-fantasy’. But compared to the boys’ stories Orwell cites, I don’t believe the girls’ stories played this up. There was no snobbery about titled girls, for example, no female equivalent of the monocled Lord Peter Wimsey silly-ass types Orwell identifies who could be relied upon in any emergency. I’m trying to get indignant about the subliminal propaganda of the ruling class, but it doesn’t work. I’m not bothered. Which means that either the brainwashing has been completely successful; or that it never had much effect; or even that it didn’t really exist: we used to read about fantasy schools for the rich not because conservative forces were trying to indoctrinate us, but simply because that was what we wanted to read about, and supply was meeting demand. (Just why we wanted to read about it implies another, deeper level of indoctrination, but that’s outside the scope of this essay.)

  What does bother me, however, is a seemingly trivial detail, but on such details one’s belief is sustained or shattered. How do the Silent Three hide their robes? Sometimes they are stored under the floorboards or in picnic baskets, but the whole point of them is that they must be available at any time, so we’re told the Silent Three carry them around under their blazers. I look at the drawings of these trim, pretty girls and their slim-fitting jackets. Even if they have large inside pockets, how do they cram in all that bulky fabric without looking like fat penguins? And then they have to whip them out and don them (the word is always ‘don’) with seconds to spare. Is it worth it? Is it really so important to be anonymous? Isn’t it usually pretty obvious which three girls they probably are?

  “These stories repeat themselves because they are a ritual, and when I first read them, I was taking part in that ritual, I was finding my own mantra. And despite the resemblances to Enid Blyton, they offer me something that Blyton didn’t: the heroes are all girls.”

  These days you could just wear a hoodie, balaclava and trackpants all the time, and probably get arrested as a suspected terrorist, but it’s not the same. The robes and hoods and masks mean glamour, romance, excitement. They reference Gothic tales and medieval monks and other, far more powerful and sinister secret societies. I’m beginning to think that though it’s very easy to make fun of The Silent Three with its clichés, maddeningly repetitive plots, vanishing robes and unintentional double entendres (‘the Silent Three were throbbing with excitement’), I’m missing the point. These stories repeat themselves because they are a ritual, and when I first read them, I was taking part in that ritual, I was finding my own mantra. And despite the resemblances to Enid Blyton, they offer me something that Blyton didn’t: the heroes are all girls.

  This is vitally important, because it was only in The Silent Three and in similar stories in School Friend and other comics that I found groups of girls as heroes. I know now that there were such groups in books set in girls’ schools, such as the stories of Angela Brazil or Blyton’s Malory Towers series, but I never read those. The only school stories I knew in books were about the boys in Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings books, which I thought hilariously funny, but not much to do with me or my life. But the Silent Three were mine. I felt I possessed them at some deep level, despite the fact that their school life was so remote from mine they might as well have lived in Narnia or Moominland.

  Gosh, they are so brave, so resourceful, so ingenious, so athletic, so defiant, so heroic. Especially Betty. She’s a natural leader, she’s the one who comes up with instant insanely elaborate plans, who climbs the ivy on the wall or creeps along the perilous coping or window ledge, who solves the mysteries. Every dangerous situation seems to stimulate her to further bravery, and it’s all in her eyes. ‘Betty’s eyes flashed with indignation.’ ‘Betty’s blue eyes were shining determinedly.’ ‘Behind the slits of her mask, Betty’s eyes gleamed with excitement.’ Wouldn’t you want to follow her everywhere? Or, even better – wouldn’t you want to be Betty?

  Pippi Longstocking was my first crush. I loved her spunk, her eccentricity, the way she tied bullies into knots. Pippi was strong, energetic, kooky. She was nine in the books by Astrid Lindgren – nine to my six, I’m guessing. Swedish too, her dad a sea captain like mine. No question we were made for each other.

  A brilliant fibber, a dare
devil, Pippi was the pioneer of Turnupstuffing, a cool kind of scavenger hunt with no rules, just a burst of free-range serendipity. She had a pet monkey called Mr Nelson, and mesmerised Tommy and Annika, her entourage.

  Yet the deeper reason I loved Pippi was the key she gave me. Her independence ignited mine as a reader. Her stories stirred me, lending me reason to read, and keep reading, and I love Pippi all the more. That Swedish sprite let me see the world in her village, and the universe in the book.

  David Astle

  But if Betty’s the leader, Peggy and Joan have their moments too. Their eyes also flash, gleam or shine. It’s Peggy who dives into the sea at No Man’s Tower – ‘A mood of reckless determination had gripped Peggy’ – braving the treacherous currents to swim up through the hidden entrance and retrieve the secret document. And it’s Joan who solves the Mermaid Mystery, who enacts a romantic tableau to return the treasure to the damsel by dressing up as a mermaid and sitting on a rock (no, don’t ask me why, it’s too convoluted).

  Above all, the Silent Three operate as a team, and there are moments of dazzling speed and precision where it seems they are on a military operation. ‘Under the spreading oak the Silent Three held a council of war.’ And when surprised by the plotting prefect in their secret meeting place in the school crypt, Betty shouts: ‘Blow out the candles! Escape plan B in operation! Make for the secret door!’

  By thunder, Jane, you little fool. Your most recent hypothesis has just collapsed. There is no magic whatsoever in The Silent Three. And if you’d been paying proper attention, you’d have noticed there were no magic spells in the Alice books or the Pooh books, although they do each take place in a world that seems to exist by magic. (Alice can drink or eat something that makes her shrink or grow, but that can also happen for no reason at all.) The Castle of Adventure is entirely unmagical, and you can’t get away with saying it has metaphorical magic. You really must stop jumping to such hasty conclusions, and if you must go on coming up with such daft hypotheses you had better go back and test them out with the previous books you have read. Or you’ll never come to any conclusions at all.

  Having given myself a good Alice-style scolding, I fall back on my eternal curiosity about the creators of my favourite reading. But this time I can’t come up with much. There’s a cult following for the men behind the cartoons for boys, which expands into something uncomfortably like idolatry when we get to the American superhero comics such as Marvel and the chain of blockbuster movies they have spawned. But the girls’ comics are seen as very humble relatives and get scant attention. The Silent Three comic strip was published in School Friend from 1950 to 1963 and I’m astonished but not displeased to discover that it was two men who created the words for this very female world. Horace Boyten and Stewart Pride wrote the stories, and at least some and possibly all of the drawings were done by Evelyn Flinders. Pride was managing editor of School Friend’s publishers Amalgamated Press and Boyten worked there as an editor and writer. A colleague, Terry Magee, described Boyten as ‘a very nice chap, quiet and modest’. He worked under the name Enid Boyten until he got a complaint from Enid Blyton’s solicitors, and after that he used the name Hilda Boyten. Evelyn Flinders went to Hornsey Art School when she was fifteen, and apart from a period in an armaments factory during the Second World War, she spent her working life drawing for girls’ comics until she retired in 1959.

  “the girls’ comics are seen as very humble relatives and get scant attention”

  The Silent Three have a before-life and an afterlife. In The Lady Investigates: Women Detectives and Spies in Fiction, by Patricia Craig and Mary Cadogan, it is claimed the trio was a refurbished version of secret societies that had been featured since the 1930s in Amalgamated Press papers. One was The Silent Six, a serial which J. B. Bobin began for the 1932 Schoolgirls’ Weekly and revived two years later. The Silent Six also had miraculously compressible robes:

  “and I’m astonished but not displeased to discover that it was two men who created the words for this very female world.”

  The Six were juniors who had banded together under the leadership of Shirley Carew ‘to fight for fair play and the suppression of sneaking at High-croft School’. They are always on the scent of some mystery or other, or of some act of ‘cruel persecution of a scholarship girl’ to put down. They are in fact quite at a loss if there is no immediate problem for them to unravel: ‘Wednesday again, girls! What are we going to do with ourselves this afternoon? There isn’t anybody for the Six to ladle out a little justice to, is there?’ In the illustrations to these early stories the Silent Six appear to be not so much hooded and robed as totally enveloped in their picturesque garb. Rather surprisingly, however, each member of the society manages to conceal her robe under her gymslip when necessary by winding ‘the long length of black material around her slender waist’.

  The afterlife came in the 1980s, courtesy of the English cartoonist Posy Simmonds, who read the Silent Three adventures as a child and had the bright idea of resur-recting the trio as The Silent Three of St Botolph’s, a strip that ran in The Guardian. The story was about what the secret society members were doing now they were grown up and had turned into Guardian women. At first there was reference to hoods and masks and righting wrongs, but that soon faded out, and what we read about was Trish, Jo and Wendy, a trio of trendy and frequently angst-ridden middle-class ladies and their families and friends. Simmonds had a lot of fun satirising contemporary mo-res as Laura Ashley-clad mums wheeled their toddlers around London. I loved those cartoons, but I never felt they had anything much to do with the original Silent Three. I couldn’t imagine those plucky girls ever marrying neurotic leftie academics or adulterous ad men or whisky salesmen, and descending into domesticity and childbearing.

  I take another look at Evelyn Flinders’s drawings. I find them very appealing and I’m not quite sure why, though a large part of it must be nostalgia. Like Tresilian’s girls in The Castle of Adventure, the chums are blandly pretty and almost indistinguishable, only the hairstyles are different. I think what I like best is the astonishing level of detail. All Flinders is required to do is fill in the background to the action, which takes place either in a school or in a holiday setting, but it’s such an intricate background: English landscape, country houses, beaches, interiors with antique furniture and ornaments, gardens, the castle-like towers and battlements of St Kit’s or the Art Deco style of the school the girls go to later, Island School, and of course caves and crypts and secret passages. This is Enid Blyton country: there’s nothing urban or gritty here. In one picture, Betty’s bed is a four-poster covered in frills. I didn’t know anyone who went to such posh schools or lived in such grand houses, and that’s part of the charm. (Other School Friend stories were about girls who went skiing at chalet schools in the Alps, or danced at ballerina schools, all part of the wish-fulfilment world.) And when the Silent Three have a picnic or a tea party, the cloth is crowded with cakes and piles of tarts and biscuits; you wonder how they keep their slim figures.

  This was the life for me – luxurious surroundings, great food, danger, adventure, excitement, and above all the sense of belonging, of being in a group of staunch friends. And it was a life I didn’t have. At the age I first read School Friend, I had not a single school friend of my own, and that was a source of agonising loneliness and shame. I remember all too distinctly the moment when it dawned on me how isolated I was. The class teacher had drawn up a map of friendships and stuck it on the wall. Everyone had been asked to write down their own name and the name of their best friend and give it to the teacher. The resulting map had names on it, each in a little circle, and the circles were linked to each other with lines, which in places got very dense and criss-crossed. Way up in one corner, in an ocean of white space, was my name, and from it descended a long line, to another girl’s name. Let’s call her Cathy. Cathy’s name was right next to another – let’s call her Annabel – and the two names were linked with two short cosy lines.

>   “This was the life for me – luxurious surroundings, great food, danger, adventure, excitement, and above all the sense of belonging, of being in a group of staunch friends.”

  I shared a desk with Cathy, we talked to each other, and I’d very cautiously allowed myself to believe that we might be friends. Now it became clear she just tolerated me, and her affections were with Annabel. I knew she spent a lot of time with Annabel, but I had been telling myself we could be a threesome. But the rules of best friendships precluded threesomes. I would not have secrets whispered to me, special glances, confiding giggles. I was in a big white ocean.

  Maybe if I had had the courage to take the initiative, to push a bit, to make that twosome into a threesome, I would have found my salvation. But I was too frightened to make any move. I had no idea what to say to Cathy, to Annabel, to anyone. It was too humiliating. I withdrew, gave up. I became the Silent One. I took to standing alone in the playground at breaks while crowds of children swirled around me, proud and dumb and miserable.

  “I withdrew, gave up. I became the Silent One. I took to standing alone in the playground at breaks while crowds of children swirled around me, proud and dumb and miserable.”

  I must have said something at home, given myself away, because my father was worried about me. Why wouldn’t I make friends? No-one would talk to me, I said. But they talk to you all the time, he said. When I take you to school, they come up to you and say ‘Hello, Jane.’ ‘How are you, Jane?’ I gazed at him in amazement. I’d never heard those voices. Or if I had, I thought they were mocking me. And his pointing them out didn’t help. Nothing did.

  Very slowly, things changed. I grew out of my isolation, and I found friends at my next school, I’m not sure which came first. But I was always shy and terrified of rejection, and therefore all too quick to see it, even if it didn’t exist.