Only the Silent Three Could Help Her

People sometimes give shoujo manga credit for being the first popular genre of comics for girls. But during the 50s ans 60s, when the prototypes of modern shoujo were just being developed, another kind of girls' comics were already thriving halfway around the world in the United Kingdom.

British girls' comics were circulated in periodicals such as Bunty, Judy, and Diana which bore quite a resemblance to shoujo's Margaret, Ciao, and Princess, with comics sharing pages with short stories, recipes, and beauty tips. The kinds of stories they covered reflected the kinds of stories that were popular in girls' novels of the day - so naturally many of them were girls' school stories.

Most of the school stories were thoroughly of the Angela Brazil, Enid Blyton type: hockey games, midnight feasts, pranks and scrapes. This one, though, which I read on the awesome comic blog Out of This World, has an interesting twist. It's about three girls who dress in hooded robes and black masks to become "The Silent Three", a secret society that works in secret to give their aid to those who ask for it.

This time, it's a school maid who asks for help. She's been sacked for breaking the headmistress's vase, but says that she didn't do it. It's up to the Silent Three to find up who framed her. It's all quite exciting, if implausible.



And it's got me well hooked on British girls' comics, too. I'll be on the lookout for more comic school stories.

Secret Places

It's World War II. The Allied and Axis forces are entangled in a bloody battle that spans the globe with no end in sight. And, somewhere in London, a German girl named Laura enrolls in an unremarkable girls' day school.

The wartime anti-German hatred is extended to her as a matter of course; she is called a hun and blamed when an English soldier is killed by a German. During that first week she is ostracized by all the girls - all except one, Patience.



Patience (played by the beautiful Tara MacGowran) is a thoughtful girl with enough insight to realize how unfair her classmates' treatment of Laura is. By not being cruel to her she ends up befriending her almost accidentally. Their friendship deepens as the months pass in their idyllic setting, seemingly so far from the war, until Patience's sentimental affection for Laura grows to such a level that she feels she must end it. Her decision has disastrous effects.



Secret Places is the kind of film that is more occupied with atmosphere than plot. There are plenty of lovely spans of the English summer countryside as nostalgic piano music plays. The whole film is imbued with so much nostalgia that it seems almost sepia-toned with it. There is drama, multiple storylines of it, but not a single loose end is ever really tied; whoever was missing is either still missing or dead, and Patience's attraction to Laura feels more forgotten about in the end than anything else.



Still it was a beautiful film that will linger in my memory for a long time. I've got to seek out the book it was based on.