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

https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Antonia+Forest%22

link to two of the books.

@TarquinGyrfalcon great name! The thing that fascinates me about The Thursday Kidnapping is that the two sets of parents bugger off - the Daddies to their Very Important secret job; the Mummies to go shopping in the West End- leaving an 8 year old, a 9 year old and a baby in the charge of a 12 year old and a 13 year old. All day! And when disaster, including a serious road accident, occurs, does anyone call social services? Suggest that the parents are grossly irresponsible? Obviously not . A nice middle class Hampstead family!

Trennels used to do vast amounts of fan fic prompts so there was at one point a huge amount of it. I assume some of it has found its way to AO3. Some of it comical — crossovers between Kingscote and the Chalet School, Lawrie in Richard Curtis films. Some rather glum, like a cautious romance between Rowan and Jan Scott, years on. Lots of yearning across desks in small town solicitors’ offices.

Have a look on Abe Books. You can usually find secondhand paperbacks. I thoroughly recommend reading them all, even the rather mad The Thuggery Affair, which has a plot that involves pigeons drug smuggling and Patrick joyriding in a stolen car with a Teddy boy who speaks impenetrable slang.

I've read Patrick and Peter fanfic in the dim and distant past! I can't remember where - AO3 perhaps? There was quite a lot of fic about all of them as adults.

I enjoyed the essay posted above about Ann who I think is treated appallingly by the rest of the family. I find Nick irritating because she's so obviously the one we're supposed to admire. It made me much more sympathetic to flawed Ginty and Lawrie who always seemed more relatable.

Yes the change in money is what threw me the most. It suddenly felt so unromantic that things were suddenly 20p rather than shillings and pence. I didn't realise until this thread that AF just matched them to the time she wrote them. I just assumed the timeline included decimalisation; I don't think I even registered the other anomalies.

Marie died! God id completely forgotten - I’m even worse than the Marlows. That’s a bit too convenient isn’t it. I guess she was quite a painful character to write about. It would have been more interesting to bring her back as a bully to others maybe.

I totally get that Nicola didn’t know about her dead uncles. This is where my specialist knowledge as the youngest by a long way of a biggish family (cousins in my case rather than all siblings) comes in. There is a lot of information that gets shared with older children but doesn’t get discussed again when the younger ones are growing up. What I didn’t know about my own family would fill several books. I was also completely incurious about most of it, much like Lawrie. I’ve read a blog today about End of Term with everyone very shocked at Lawrie’s total ignorance of basic religious knowledge. All I can say is that I can relate - and I was a church choir member, a reader and supposedly academic. It would never have occurred to me that Jesus was Jewish, though I don’t think I would have been as crass as Lawrie in how I received the clarification. The antisemitism endemic to British mainstream culture sometimes translates into just a big gap of ‘things that aren’t mentioned’.

I think 'none of them care' is slightly overstating the position. None of them quite know what they should be feeling when someone they disliked dies. Some go for expressing regret because they feel they ought, others try harder to articulate their feelings more accurately. When Lawrie says she wishes no-one had told them then they'd just have forgotten about Marie, this is 'more heartless than even Tim cared for'. But Lawrie is generally a self-centred character.

Of the 'A' form, only Nicola and Lawrie have a genuine reason to dislike Marie (because she lied about the hike). Lawrie has blabbed to Tim about this, but there's no evidence it has gone further. The others dislike her in a herd-like way because she's grubby and over-eager to be liked.

Marie's story is tragic. When she lied about the twins having waved to her on the hike, it was very much an impulsive decision, not a calculated one, because she wanted to hide her fear of the farmyard and the fact she hadn't done what Lois had told her; and once she'd told the lie she felt she had little option but to go on with it.

As for the whole hike debacle, the people really at fault were Miss Redmond and Miss Leslie, the guide commissioner. It's not the only time Miss Keith nails it - as Karen reports, her view as 'it was the school's fault because there was insufficient supervision'. 'The rules say only three guides' per hike probably to avoid exactly the type of scenario that occurred. Miss Redmond tells Lois she should have found something to occupy the twins to stop them misbehaving - Redmond says this as an experienced teacher, but Lois wasn't even an experienced Patrol Leader. The twins are scapegoated by Redmond, and Marie is collateral damage.

Can you tell I love the whole hike story, it's so brilliantly nuanced!

I think maybe the series I read was a reprint only of the school ones. I never came across any of the other books to read even once I realised they existed. I assume they are out of print now.

Penguin/Puffin did the school ones but not the non-school ones. Faber did the non-school ones but I think they went out of print quite quickly.

Girls Gone By, a specialist small publisher, has redone all of them, but don't know if they're currently in print. There might be 2nd hand copies around.

It's decades ago now, but I still remember the thrill when I found Falconer's Lure in a library sale. I'd been wanting to re-read it for ages.

After reading the likes of Mallory Towers, Nick, Lawrie, Tim and Miranda were so refreshing!
Is anyone else like me who got the school books from the library as a child and was confused not by jumping decades but to passing references to massive life events not included in the books? I think maybe the series I read was a reprint only of the school ones. I never came across any of the other books to read even once I realised they existed. I assume they are out of print now.

I think one gets a better understanding of Peter, and can be more sympathetic, having read Marlows and the Traitor and Falconer's Lure. He did have some fairly traumatic experiences, and only Nicola seems to realise and remember.

That said, he is very annoying at times, but then he's a teenage boy.

I think the argument over buying horses when the family fortunes were in a dicey state is a bit pointless, arising from the long gaps between the books. When AF wrote about the horses, she didn't know that she was going to want to use the family fortunes as a plot device in Cricket Term.

(I used to look in on Trennels, but don't think I ever posted.)

I like this theory and would happily read fan fiction on the subject! 😄

GGBP have a reprint of The Player’s Boy in stock at the moment.

Me too!

Years ago for Christmas DH tracked down a full set of the books for me.
They are referred to as “The Precious Books” and have pride of place in my bookcase.

The Thursday Kidnapping (non Marlow book) is interesting.
Kathy is a Marie Dobson character. That grubby, unlikeable individual. But you can understand why she is like that when you look at her circumstances.

Does noone else think that Peter and Patrick are headed to end up together? Foreshadowed when Patrick rescues Peter from the cliff? And that is why Peter struggles so much with all the "man" stuff, and Patrick is so stupid with the women?!

I love Rowan and Peter.

Rowan for her brisk practicality that occasionally fails her and Peter for the complexity of his thought process. Peter and Esther would have been an interesting couple.

Patrick infuriates me but intrigues me. He’s so privileged and in many ways naive - I’d love to see him and Miranda meeting.

Giles is just a pompous arse. The way he treats his sisters is horribly avuncular and patronising on so many occasions.

The non-school books in order are (I think):

The Marlows and the Traitor
Falconer’s Lure
Peter’s Room
The Thuggery Affair
The Ready Made Family
Run Away Home

Of those I think Peter’s Room and The Ready Made Family are the strongest, but they are all worth reading.

i can’t believe I’ve found, if not my people, people who know astoundingly more than me!

I have all the school books I think but not the others - coukd someone suggest a reading list?

I like Rowan and I have a soft spot for Anne. Can’t stand Giles-and I knew a lot of Gileses in my youth! I swither over Nick and Peter. I think Peter is a victim of his family’s expectation- he has absolutely no choice about his navy career.

Peter’s Room is such a clever and interesting book because it shows so clearly the attractions and danger of getting immersed in a fantasy world. I don’t mind the Gondal narrative bits because they demonstrate the kind of overwrought fantasy that teenagers enjoyed then and now. Look at the current popularity of the Romantasy genre. More sex in those obviously though there is clearly a sexual undercurrent in the Rupert/Crispian fantasy which then carries over into the real life Patrick/Ginty relationship.

(Were the brothers Piers, Something, Giles and Rollo?)

I just checked my (ancient, falling apart) copy. Piers, Rollo, Giles and Terence! Presumably the younger Giles is named for his late uncle, which makes it even odder that Nicola wasn’t aware of them.