I win at opening my mouth and singing with the golden notes of a blackbird, for I have caused illness and mental breakdown, so profoundly moving is my musicality.
Back to Lavender (again, sorry): it very heavily foreshadows Gay, doesn't it? I hadn't noticed before.
There's a conversation between Robin and Daisy (when Daisy is fretting that the reason they've not seen Jo and Steve yet is because Jo doesn't want them any more :( poor Daisy) in which they talk about how awful Sybil is (because she doesn't want her mother to love anyone else, and because she has always been told by visitors how beautiful she is) and how "Jo knows what Sybil is" and Sybil needs to learn to get over her vanity and jealousy.
There's an increasing closeness between Hilda and Nell, and also a rather gratuitous (IMO) line from Nell about how, when she thought they wouldn't survive the crossing from Guernsey, it wasn't especially sad in her case because there's no one to miss her :(
There's also a helpful and plot-irrelevant introduction to Gay herself, including her having come from China.
I suppose these are the perks of reading in order...
It is particularly full of 'explanations' as to how Jo is special, though. I think I am actually finding Jo more irritating in these books than I recall finding her in later ones, because later on it just descends into farce and is therefore impossible to be quite so seriously annoyed by it.
And I don't buy into this idea that Madge is so cowed by Sybil's emotional needs that she refrains from showing affection towards her various nieces and nephews. Daisy saying that 'Madge is a darling, but Jo's just so special' and how she feels sorry for Peggy and Bride, feels like it undermines years of loveliness from Madge. It's not that I think Madge is perfect, exactly well only a little bit but finding endless unconditional love and managing difficult relationships among the children of her household is Madge's forte, isn't it?
There is also an odd comment on the problematic age gap between Sybil and Josette. This issue arises a few times in the series (Jo's gaps naturally being usually perfect) and interests me - can't work out if EBD is actually advocating some degree of family planning, or if she thinks ideal age gaps are gifts from god. I always wonder if Mollie Bettany's general ill health/delicacy later on is related to a number of births in quick succession when she's fairly young (doesn't she have the first twins at 19, and Bride less than a year later - then still a small gap between Bride and Jackie, and again between Jackie and second twins?). I was chatting with my own grandma yesterday, about her grandma who had 16 - all singletons (poor woman) and all but one survived childhood, too, in spite of great poverty. (NB actual poverty, not just 'our guardian has squandered all our money and we only have a private income of £100 a year' Bettany poverty!)