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

The Trennels that the 20thc Marlows live in was built by an ancestor who made a pile in the slave trade, and the older Trennels house was the farmhouse where the Tranters, and later the Dodds, live, isn't it? So the money that raised them from yeomen to gentry or gentry-adjacent was far more recent than the source of the Merrick wealth (presumably land?) But yes, much on a level by the mid-20thc, enough for Nicola to be only mildly struck by the house's magnificence when she's first inside it.

I always note the rather feudal bit where Mrs Bertie and Doris and lot of other women from the village go to 'lend a hand at the Merricks' do' aka the Twelfth Night ball, and we see Doris coming with the Marlows' wraps and coats during the geese scene, so Doris and Mrs B, who are offered a lift home by Mrs Marlow, stay to the very end, after all guests other than the Marlows have gone home and Mrs B is up early enough to cook all the hunters a huge breakfast in the morning.

Helena Merrick says something, apparently more to Pam Marlow than to Doris and Mrs Bertie, because PM has just offered to drive them home, like 'They've been the greatest possible help -- I'm everlastingly grateful'.

I mean, why? If large numbers of village women do this every year, can the Merricks have been paying them all? If not, why?

ETA I always notice it because there's a terribly sad Edna O'Brien short story set at around the same period in which a young girl thinks she's actually invited to a party at a rather grander house in the neighbourhood, and gets all dressed up in a dress that was sent in a parcel by a relative who lives in the US, only to discover when she gets there, bringing a present of fresh cream, that she's essentially the unpaid hired help, carrying around refreshments and helping in the kitchen.

I read Changing Times years ago & I’d completely forgotten about it until this post.

That bit in Changing Times when Victoria timetravels to her own future and discovers she's entered into exactly the same kind of abusive, unequal marriage as her mother, for the same reason, is brilliantly chilling. And even leaving aside the relationship with the future Daniel, the scenes where she has to get up, tend to 'her' two children whom she's never met, make them breakfast and get them to school in a flat and in an place she's never seen before, under the eye of a hostile husband and a child who instinctively knows she's not really her mother, is absolutely petrifying.

I've just got out my copy of The Marlows and the Traitor, and the passage goes:

She wondered if she could hang by her hands and then drop but there were only about four feet of Lawrie and a good fifteen feet of wall. That still left eleven feet no, a bit less because her arms would lengthen her --

And then she uses her cardigan to shorten the drop, but as her knot is not the proper 'round turn with two half hitches' that Peter or Nicola would have made, it gives way and even though she's let herself down the length of the cardigan till she's holding on by the bottom sleeve, she still 'fell the last few feet'.

ETA: Sorry, AF's actual punctuation causes strikethrough on Mn!

she was probably supposed to do all the food shopping and meal planning which isn’t nothing.

Rationing was still in force in the early books, which would have made it more complicated.

I suppose Mrs Bertie would have done all the meal planning when it was just Great Uncle Lawrence and Cousin Jon, but she probably thought that when there was a Lady of the House, it was her job.

I’m quite intrigued by the relationship between the Merricks and the Marlows too (beyond Patrick and Ginty/Nicola). Do they get on or is it another toleration due to being of a similar social class? And are they the same social class?

In the 16th century books, the Merricks were gentry and the Marlows were yeomen. I think the Marlows had moved up a little over the centuries, but the Merricks' house was never a farmhouse as Trennels was.

It must have been a big change for Pam moving to Trennels. She presumably had her own life in London. The children didn't notice it so much being away most of the year, and Rowan was busy with the farm, but Pam must have been on her own a lot, not knowing anyone local. The Merricks were mostly in London, so no help. Which book is it where Rowan says they're beginning to be invited to things because people have realised they are there to stay?

I hadnt really thought much about Pam. I would guess she was one of those who has suffered/benefited from being not very visible to those around her all her life. I would guess that she manages to look busy while not doing all that much, because she’s mostly ignored. Bits of housework and horse grooming but much more often sitting and gossiping with those doing the work, meaning that she doesn’t lose employees. Riding without fail every day. Writing letters- if you are writing every week to all relatives including husband and multiple boarding children plus a bit less often to lots of elderlies and old friends, plus paying all the bills by cheque and doing the accounts - to be fair to her that did add up in the old days, plus frequent trips to the post office for more stamps and stationery, trips to the bank for cash (we forget how much effort was involved in making sure you had adequate cash in the house) and as the woman of the house she was probably supposed to do all the food shopping and meal planning which isn’t nothing. Going to the lending library and the WI. Not to mention clothes making and mending - if you rely on hand me downs which we all did, that takes some doing. I can imagine Pam being very inefficient about all that with each food trip taking up several attempts at lists and planning and moaning about doing it, then doing it, then having up go back or ring up the butcher and fishmonger for bits you’ve forgotten, discussing at length what could replace it and getting that instead. And deciding which rooms and beds to make up or shut down as children and guests came and went, finding enough decent clean bedding, putting flowers and biscuits in the room, replacing lightbulbs in the bedside lamp might take all afternoon and then it’s time to peel the potatoes and draw the curtains and find the tonic. Mainly because I would have been like that too.

The twins are at home until Autumn Term so that's really less than a year until they move to Trennels when she would have been on her own, and they were in London then.

I did. I also read Changing Times and The Fortunate Few. Incredibly well written and the plots/ideas have stayed with me. I did find them very cold though.There was certainly no sugar coating.The Antonia Forest connection passed me by completely.

Yes, I particularly like The Spellcoats and thought the way it came together in a version of ‘modern times’ in The Crown of Dalemark’ was very clever. DWJ was always amazing but I think that might have been the last of hers (in order of publication) that I felt was truly on my wow list.

@WryNecked Exactly! I can’t see her doing lots of Good Work. I’m quite intrigued by the relationship between the Merricks and the Marlows too (beyond Patrick and Ginty/Nicola). Do they get on or is it another toleration due to being of a similar social class? And are they the same social class? The Merricks bought the Marlow house in London, so some overlap of ‘standards’ presumably.

Always thought it was funny that Chas is not allowed to go ahead with his daring suggestion that he might call Nicola 'Nickers' but 'Nacker' is fine.

Well that was Nicola's choice, wasn't it. She recognised that Chas was intending to be cheeky when he suggested Nickers, so she told him no.

No, I've read far too little TK, though what I've read (when I was a child) was very good. I loved Here Tomorrow, Gone Today, and Changing Times (which was incredibly sophisticated about relationships and bad marriages).

Pam is a strange, inconsistent character in many ways, I think.

I mean, parents in many children's books are just background filler to be got out of the way so that the children can have risky adventures, but AF is a more serious novelist than that, though I think there's a bit of that trope sometimes going on with Pam in something like The Marlows and the Traitor, where they're all off on holidays at a hotel and then Pam goes off to see Geoff for the weekend and is lied to by the authorities about everything. (Is she ever told the truth, actually?)

There's somewhere she's described as 'gay and improvident', I think, and there's that blithe, irresponsible side of her that blows the Last Ditch on Catkin and Chocbar. Then at other points she's quite strict and doctrinaire about hunting manners or the children shouting at one another around the house, or the Changear affair or the fallout from swapping for the netball match and the Play, and we see her coming down hard on Ginty in her Patrick-obsessed moments, or lighting cigarettes in irritation at the breakfast table. She doesn't seem to have any particular input into whether Rowan takes on the farm manager role or not, and refuses to invoke any kind of parental authority over Karen when she's contemplating her disastrous marriage.

She eloped as a teenager because her mother wasn't keen on Geoff, but after an initial period of balls and parties (recalled in Mum's Chest), she's now essentially in many ways a single woman living alone, in a giant entailed house. She has staff, so doesn't do housework, her cooking is famously awful, all her children are either at sea or at boarding school, and she clearly has no involvement in the farm. No one even suggests she might step in when Mr Tranter has his stroke.

What does she do all day?

It must have been an incredible change when Rowan left school so was at home all the time, and then when Karen, Edwin and the children moved into the Tranters' house.

That sounds like the Chalet School, with the staff happily puffing away.

On DWJ, are there any other devotees of Dalemark books who really wish she'd written another?

AF was very reluctant to change things in the books that hadn't aged well. She refused to take out references to non-villainous characters smoking, hence we have Pam and the Kingscote staff puffing away happily and Patrick admitting to being an occasional smoker.

Not to mention Chas's dog, Sam, the offensiveness of whose name was carefully downgraded via 'LBS' from its original form in The Ready Made Family.