Last Term for Helen

Melling School #3

by Margaret Biggs, Louis Ward (Illustrator)

Genres: School Stories

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1953

About the author

Born in 1929 in Orpington, Kent, Margaret Biggs was the daughter of a local Sales Manager for Chivers. Her family moved to Barnet, in Hertfordshire, in 1935, where she attended Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School until 1946. When she left school, she went to work for the editorial department of the Evans Brothers publishing company, in Bloomsbury. She married David Cadney in 1953, and moved with him to Finchley, and then (in the 1960s) to Solihull, in the West Midlands, where she still lives today. She has one daughter and two sons.

The author of a number of popular and collectible girls' school stories, Margaret Biggs is probably best known for her Melling School series, which is set at a weekly boarding school and is unusual, in that it shows boarding school life and home life side by side. The interaction between girls and boys is also atypical of the genre at that time.

Reviews

[Georgia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Much preferred this to the first in the series. Biggs is a slightly more experienced writer by this point - she was only twenty when she started to write the first book.

[Lady_bercilak · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this third book of the Melling series, Helen and Libby are looking forward to a cruisy last term at the school. They figure they have the school sorted so that everything will be plain sailing. However, the headmistress falls ill and a temporary replacement steps in, who does not approve of the Blakes and their rather independent ways. Things become difficult, and events at home make things even more difficult for Helen and her family.
Another charming book about the Blakes and their friends at Melling and the surrounding villages.

[Emilia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I absolutely love this series! The characters are so real and so you really get to know them. Definitely one of my favourite school series.