Antonia Forest

Interesting. I belong to the Marlow sort of upper middle social class- and my siblings and I are not a million years away from Marlow children ages. And I have never thought the attitude to clothes in the books odd- I had "mummy having friends for tea" sort of dresses, and a party dress made by my mother at Christmas. And everything else was hand me downs (and I only had brothers can't imagine what I looked like!) or home made. Some of my friends had proper fashionable clothes but we tended to think they were rather common I think there was a sort of inverted snobbery about not thinking about clothes at all, and being as scruffy as possible. I remember my mother being quite sniffy about the Royal children being so very carefully smart.

I shall anounce to mine that they must put on supper dresses when I have friends round. Ds can wear a shirt and tie and wait on us like the Maynard boys.
predicts rebellion

I think one of the things that strikes me as very 1950s about even the later books is the division between formal and informal clothes, even for teenagers. It's clear that fashion, apart from the Changear interlude, doesn't enter into the Marlows ' lives - all clothes are handed on to the younger ones, and anything new comes from Doris making over old dance dresses from The Chest, and then only for special occasions. What the majority of the twins' form wear as 'supper dresses' is what they wear 'when Mummy has friends to tea', a category we just don't have any more!

It's one of the oddities of the books being set in the year they were written, aeons apart, isn't it? So not only do you have Ginty being afraid of going into enclosed spaces because of her experiences in the Blitz while her boyfriend and exact contemporary quibbles about the effects of Vatican 2 in his mid-teens, you have these very 1950s ideas about dress clashing with Lawrie dressing up as a punk and Nick and Miranda buying very seventies 'flash gear'.

The Marlows in general always seem to me to sit more easily in the 1950s than in the 70s and early 80s, mind you.

The childish might depend though on who wears it. As I was saying dress styles that made dd1 age 5yo look like she was dressed up as a baby, dd2, age 11yo (and is very tall with it) still look superb on, and not babyish.

I would think it wouldn't be the height of fashion and look pretty old fashioned. The Wests strike me as being somewhat old-fashioned in a lot of ways. They probably would also have that sort of dress specially made, perhaps to the grandmother's orders-in which case a dress that was fashionable when she was a child might well be what she orders.
Nicola is independent enough minded to like a dress that isn't in fashion, the old-fashioness off it might even appeal more. Lawrie probably wouldn't be seen dead in it.

Yes, it was a temporary thing, girls moved out of it as they were ready - so Nocola moved into IIIA before Lawrie. So in some ways it was better than a B form. Though as Miss Cromwell said "A B form is just a B form, not a labour camp"

But how old is Nick when Miranda passes on the dress? Fourteen-ish? It does sound childish - though what baffles me about the dress too is how, if it's elaborate enough to wear to a special Twelfth Night party, even the Wests' dopey au pair can have thought it was suitable for Miranda to sit about in during school evenings...? And M was planning to 'chop' it into a mini, which sounds even weirder! (Not that I have any real sense of what a 'supper dress' might have actually looked like...)

AF seems to have liked stripes, too - she gives Miranda an 'elegant black and emerald green striped dress', and Nick's Christmas present is a green and white striped party dress...

Mind you, the twins must have been built like twigs, given that Lawrie can wear a younger boy's monkey costume (how old is Edward Oeschli - 12?) and have it be baggy on her. Clearly no burgeoning curves...

You're right, it was Miss Cromwell. My mistake.

But Ginty doesn't actually lie right out about the diving cup. She says "may be" and "might have" so deliberately making them think she had, but kind of not actually stepping over the line of a lie, and if she was challenged she'd have said all wide eyed "but I never really said I had".
Which is why the hair clip reason would have gone with her character well. She knew it wasn't true, but by finding the hair clip and taking it, she could then pretend that was what happened.
I think her own moral compass was that as long as she didn't outright lie, it was fine. The garden was an outright lie; the hair clip, whereas not true, I'm sure she would have told it as a "Nicola had borrowed a hair clip, I needed it so went to get it back... I was seen putting her letter case back" so not actually saying she had read/hadn't read a letter. If they'd directly challenged her then I bet she'd have said something non-committal like "well Ann thought I must have" or "why would i want to read her letters?" not a deny.

I imagine the dress to be a high square yoke-but not empire line, so above the natural waist, but not really high, and lots of very tiny pleats. Like this only with the skirt pleated.
www.fashion-era.com/images/Children/cc1825hands.jpg

It's a style that either suits or doesn't suit, as it's quite childish.
My dd1 never looked good in high waists, although generally she was very easy to dress. By the time she was 4 or 5 that sort of style made her look like I was dressing her up too young. My dd2 is 11yo and still looks lovely in that style. (but dd1 looked lovely in flounces and bows, and dd2 looks much better in simple styles).

Wasn't it Miss Cromwell who liked to keep the prefects down, not Miss Keith?

I think Miss Keith is generally depicted as not the best head. Witness the nonsense of deciding on play casting and games team membership by character rather than talent.

I thought Spring Term was good, but I think if AF had written the follow-up book she would have left the relationship between Nick and Patrick much more low key. Ginty's lies do ring true, as they're very much in line with her letting Monica think that she'd messed up the diving for her sake.

Miss Keith does come across as unfair as a whole.
Autumn term: She has a go at Karen for Nicola dropping her knife out of the window and stopping the chair. They comment that she "likes" to have the prefects in trouble.
Spring term: The casting of the play is totally blamed on her.
Cricket term: You get the Jan Scott comments-how she refused to do a voluntary job and was written off for the rest of the time at school.
Attic term: Giving Nicola the same punishment didn't ring true to me going in with her comments on Autumn term to Karen on being responsible for the younger ones. From that you would have expected her to come down harder on Ginty not necessarily let Nicola off scot free, but definitely Ginty bear the brunt of the punishment.

I can't' remember which book, falling- I'll have a look shortly. Rowan said it after she had left school.....she was talking to Nick.

Adored them as a child and I still think AF is an astonishing novelist now, as an adult. I have copies of all, from GGB and charity shop finds, and read them regularly. I think the Shakespearean books are particularly good, and Traitor perhaps the weakest. I seem to often be alone in AF discussions in actually reading the fantasy bits of Peter's Room.

Trennels LJ community is great for discussing the finer points - look up the archives for sometimes vitriolic, very well-informed arguments about such minutiae as whether Mrs Marlow was unfair to blow the proceeds of an ancient family tiara on buying her and Ginty horses, or what exactly the lovely cream silk dress Nick inherits from Miranda West can possibly have looked like! (Because cream silk fine pleats falling from a high yoke always sounds like an expensive nightie to me...)

Keith was very unfair to Nicola in Attic Term. Her crime was much less than Ginty's but she got the same punishment,,,

But Miss Keith always comes across badly- remember "forgettable river smell"? Always loved that description!

I didj't really see it as set in the 80s. I would have put it earlier.
But my experience of all girls schools even in the 80s is that the head could do a very good line in "our gals do not behave like that", so I don't have an issue over that.

SPOILERS

I thought the reaction was very Ann-she wanted to put it right among her sisters for what she saw was a dreadful thing to do. But her reaction is "of course Ginty will want to confess and get forgiveness", and then when she didn't get that, she was all at sea.
I did feel the conversation with Miss Redmond was a bit forced, and I didn't get her going to Miss Keith over it. Miss Redmond sort of dismissed it, so why go to higher authority-maybe going to Ginty's form mistress. Perhaps Ann could have disturbed Ginty and Ginty shoved it down her blouse to hide it, and is caught later when Nicola is looking for it.

The other bit I didn't get was why Ginty had to make up the story that it was going across the garden. I would have thought her initial story about the hair clip would have been much better:
"Nicola had borrowed my hair slide earlier, and when I asked for it back, she was in a hurry, so told me to take it back myself. It had fallen to the bottom of the drawer, so I had to take her letter folder out to find it, and I was seen putting it back".
If she'd said that then I suspect her friends would have totally believed her and all would have been fine. They would still have seen her as a huge miscarriage of justice. I know she wanted to seem heroic, but I think little hedging excuses were much more her line than whoppers-Lawrie would have gone for the huge whopper, probably pretty much believing it herself by the end.

I've just been chatting to dd. She says she thinks th only book she's ever read that does teenage friendships better than AF is Northanger Abbey!

And this is a girl who chain-read written for teenagers books with pink and bits of foil covers.