Around 40 years ago, Steven found a copy of Six on Goldtop Hill by Edith Twyford on a London bus and, hoping to be able to sell it for money to buy a chippie tea, took it to school with him. Not exactly a natural scholar, the only class that Steven quite liked was remedial English, which was taught by the unusually charismatic Miss Isles – or ‘missiles’ as the transcription software maintains. According to Miss Isles, Twyford’s books had been banned due to being “nasty, sadistic, moral little tales full of pompous superiority at best and blatant racism at worst”. As Steven was unable to read the book himself, he had to take Miss Isles’ word for it when she claimed there was a note inside saying “Deliver to Alice Isles” and confiscated it.
Nevertheless, due to the interest that Steven and the other four students in her remedial English class showed in studying a banned book, Miss Isles dedicated some lesson time to reading passages from Six on Goldtop Hill, and here Hallett delivers some delightfully funny pastiches of the most sexist aspects of Enid Blyton’s oeuvre. It turned out that Miss Isles was actually quite the expert on Twyford, particularly the conspiracy theory that alleged the writer had used her books to send secret coded messages to the enemy during World War II.
https://crimefictionlover.com/2022/01/t ... e-hallett/
