"Delicately balanced on a razor edge of mutual toleration": Rowan Marlow, Saint or ?

There's so much that I've forgotten; I need to re-read them all.. I've never read Run Away Home as I could never find it. I remember finding The Ready Made Family utterly bleak and depressing; I remember that scene in the kitchen described up-thread so vividly.

Lewis Foley was a great character - not out and out evil, self centred, complex and conflicted.

In one of the later books Nicola tries to say this to Peter and he refuses to engage in the conversation. There's also a line in one of the books where Peter finds himself thinking about Foley and quashes the thought immediately.

AF was Jewish and converted to Catholicism - old-school Catholicism as practised by the Merricks. I find her religious perspectives expressed through Patrick and to a lesser extend, Miranda, really interesting. It's also interesting that she made her main protagonist a sceptical CofE although with a clear 'pull' towards the Tridentine Mass when she attends it.

AF seems least tolerant of ecumenical Christianity, as described at Patrick's school. I thought Ann got a raw deal after refusing to lend Nicola a bike to attend the Merricks' chapel, not because it was a Catholic Mass but because it was a 'separatist' Catholic Mass in her eyes, whereas she was pro- the moving closer of the two strands of Christianity. That seemed a fair, personal moral stance for Ann to take (to me, as an agnostic, at least).

The one where they are trapped in the lighthouse with the killer. Soooo exciting!

Oh and (this is in the step family one I think), Nicola putting a swimsuit on in winter because it's warm in the suntrap conservatory in winter, with a stick of rock she's saved from summer, reading Persuasion and not getting it, then at the end, after seeing her sister's troubles, deciding she does get it and will try reading it again.

God I loved those books. I had to get the out of school ones from inter library loan as only they school ones were in print, and I seriously considered stealing them .

They were so vivid.

She also has a Jewish character, Miranda? Miriam? have an on-the-spot almost conversion while taking part in a Christmas service.

She must have been a very interesting person.

I loved the bit where someone asked the older brother if he liked his job (I think this was in a context of Rowan wondering if she should stick with the farm) and he says something like (I paraphrase) "Yes but that doesn't mean I wake up every morning thinking yay, what a lovely ship" (he's a naval officer).

The Player's Boy/Rebels - I've read them and I'm glad I have copies to complete my collection but, in honesty, I didn't enjoy them a quarter as much as the contemporary Marlows. It's not a period of history that I feel any particular affinity with. I always wish AF hadn't taken however many years to write them and had continued with the contemporary books, then we might have two more contemporary Marlow books.

I would love to see the part-drafted book to follow Run Away Home. AF's literary executor says there was no sign of it, but I wonder if AF gave instructions for it to be destroyed (or destroyed it herself). I keep hoping it might miraculously turn up somewhere.

Anyone read The Player’s Boy and The Player’s and the Rebels?

Many years ago.
I liked her version of Will Shakespeare and depiction of theatre life.

Yes - I love spotting the links to the Trennels books - some of the names and little things like the mention of a round window that is mentioned in the modern books.

My favourite character is Humphrey

Anyone read The Player’s Boy and The Player’s and the Rebels? I had them on practically permanent loan from the school library and loved them.

@pollyhemlock Yes, she manages to capture the realism of family life and children's interactions and behaviour so well - amazing that she was an only child herself

Yes I do love Ellen as a character. The two younger children are frankly pains in the neck but very realistic.

Devil by the Sea, by Nina Bawden, went there. It's absolutely chilling.

Patrick makes a few questionable decisions -he injures himself badly on the cliffs.Takes Peter to the cliffs where he gets stuck. Endangers Nicola on Buster a number of times including at the Boxing Day hunt when he is so wrapped up in Gondalling he doesn't notice her.

There's a great fanfic cross fiction where Rowan meets Roger Walker from Swallows and Amazons https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11281870/1/Roger-and-the-Marlows

Thought I'd revive the name for this thread!

Yes in TTK we see casual adulting at its finest!
I do love Ellen's practical and pragmatic management of her siblings and household chores (before they lose Bart)

Lots of the parenting decisions are very questionable.

I love AF as she goes to places other children's authors ignore. She explores all kinds of things like cowardice, the fact characters are nuanced - neither good nor and, loyalty - periods even get a mention in Cricket Term.

It’s terrifying. And the beginnings of Nicola being uneasy when she realises, after initially thinking ‘Thank heavens, Rose and a responsible grown up!’ that ‘Uncle Gerry’ can’t be Rose’s uncle and doesn’t know her mother is dead — it’s incredibly eerie and well-judged. And the bit where the lights come on in their empty family home…

Yes!! I don’t think I grasped the meaning of Rowan’s comment about their being ‘found under the leaves like those other children’ when I read if for the first time. It’s unbelievably dark for what’s ostensibly a children’s novel.

Indeed!😀

There’s a very long running series on Archive of Our Own where Lawrie is a world-famous actress married to Charles Maynard. https://archiveofourown.org/series/2917098

Maybe not technically a serial killer - he had killed 'other children' but if it was only two of them he doesn't qualify.

In The Ready Made Family Nick manages to rescue Karen's stepdaughter (and herself) from a serial killing paedophile Just In Time.

I can't think of any other children's book that went there.

Yes obviously times were different and children did have a lot more independence. I think it’s the fact that they are left in charge of a baby that I find especially alarming in Thursday Kidnapping. And they lose him too! Albeit temporarily.

Peter can't really handle the boat solo, so navigates for an entire night through marina traffic by luck and torchlight, whereupon the boat breaks up on the shore and they both nearly drown.

Very nearly duffers.

Mind you, I'm not sure any of the Marlow holiday books stand up to responsible parenting scrutiny, even by the standards of period children's books where adults have to be hapless, absent or actively evil in order for plots to happen.

In Falconer's Lure, Patrick has been badly injured enough to be off school for months after a fall from steep cliffs, whereupon he promptly takes Peter and Nicola up the same cliffs after young birds of prey, Peter gets stuck and nearly falls, and they have to get the coastguard to rescue them. The first their parents know of it is when it's in the local paper. Then Peter shoots and kills Patrick's hawk killing rabbits, and could probably have shot Nicola or Patrick too.

In Peter's Room, Patrick puts an old gun to his head and is about to pull the trigger without realising it's loaded before Nicola knocks his hand away, meaning it discharges out the window and nearly hits Rowan.

In The Marlows and the Traitor, not only are Peter and Nicola nearly washed out to sea in a dangerous surge on holiday, and Nicola spends all her free time with a much older male stranger she never mentions to her family. they then trespass in an empty house while their mother is away for a weekend, narrowly miss being killed by spies and ex-Nazis, are kidnapped, Ginty and Nicola nearly drown faking Peter's death, Lawrie is badly hurt and hospitalised after jumping off a bus she doesn't have a fare for into traffic, and Peter shoots and kills a man. And their mother knows nothing about any of this.

In The Thuggery Affair, Peter, Patrick and Lawrie get involved with a drug-smuggling, violent local gang, Lawrie narrowly escapes sexual assault, one gang member is stabbed and killed, Peter and Patrick are both threatened and duffed up, and Patrick joyrides with a gang member who is killed when their stolen car crashes, while Patrick is thrown clear.

In Run Away Home, Peter and the supposedly responsible Giles sail across the Channel in a barely seaworthy boat to return a fugitive child to French soil, Giles is knocked unconscious on the way home, Peter can't really handle the boat solo, so navigates for an entire night through marina traffic by luck and torchlight, whereupon the boat breaks up on the shore and they both nearly drown.

And I'm sure there's more I've forgotten.