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

@CatChant I agree with you about the DWJ podcasters. There is much to enjoy but they do have a tendency to find things ‘problematic’ because their mindset is attuned to the present day context. They find ‘colonial attitudes ‘ in Nine Lives of Christopher Chant, for example, which I just don’t think are there. I do admire their enthusiasm and commitment though.

@CorvusPurpureus No need to console your chagrin. You are absolutely right.

The line is: “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 of wall. That still left eleven feet - no, a bit less because her arms would lengthen her -“

@Oftenaddled Thank you for the tip about Changeover! I am looking forward to reading it once I’ve had a chance to print off the pdf version.

Like @pollyhemlock I don’t see a grooming element in Fire and Hemlock. I think that interpretation has come with time and our far greater awareness of the potential for abuse in adult and child relationships.

I always thought Tom wasn’t aging while he was in Laurel’s power, so Polly was catching him up. And while Polly was a hoped for escape strategy, he never placed her under any obligation to save him, while at the same time rescuing her himself from the consequences of her parents’ neglect.

The Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones podcasters would disagree but, much as I enjoy their enthusiasm and ideas, they do look at the books through a prism of twenty-first century sensibilities. In The Ogre Downstairs episode they kept harping on about the physical violence in the book as though it was abnormal rather than par for the course in a lot of 70s families. I never batted an eyelid at the brothers thumping each other, or at the Ogre beating the boys for bringing down the bathroom ceiling - he was grumpy and had a short fuse so it was entirely unsurprising.

Except - & I can't prove it because my Forests are in a box in the UK several 1000 miles away - I'm sure the line was something like 'there was about 4' of Lawrie...more because her arms would stretch her'. I distinctly remember being about the same age (& approaching 5'10 rapidly...) when I read it. Happy to be proven wrong if anyone has TM&TT on hand...my chagrin would be consolable .

Thank you, that makes sense.

I have no respect for Geoff, Pam or for Giles. Imagine agreeing to Rowan taking on the running of Trennels, no matter how convincing she was. Giles would have been very aware that it would be his in the long term too.

I think Geoff came home on leave, impregnated Pam, sailed away again, came home to see the baby born, impregnated Pam with the next one; repeat x 6.

Well, the 4ft would only have been from her feet to her shoulders, as her raised arms would overlap her head. So her actual height would have been more like 4’9” or so. Though whether the mathematically-challenged Lawrie would have realised this while hanging from her fingertips from a high wall is debatable…

When you combine the age differences with AF’s way of jumping the timeline forward through the decades though, they make more sense. Or at least they don’t make less sense.

Mind you, it's perfectly possible that in the Marlow family a slew of babies died very young and no one ever thought to mention it to the 'lower deck'.

One of the odder moments for me in the Marlowverse is when no one tells the children that Jon's death means their father inherits Trennels and they're all moving there from London immediately. 'I suppose they thought you knew' does a lot of work among the Marlows.

But is it Giles, nothing for six or seven years, then an annual pregnancy for six years, or what?

I agree with @DeanElderberry. 'Irish quads' is offensive.

The Marlow children's spacing only works at all with a very speculative combination of prematurity and virtually immediate conception after Pam gives birth, but in a way which is completely incompatible with her husband being away at sea a lot.

Thanks for that.

I was wondering about the exact spacing.

Leaving aside the extremely obnoxious use of 'Irish' there, has anyone worked out the ages and spacings of the Marlows? Giles seems to be quite a lot older than the twins.

And if Ginty is 'rising fifteen' in Peter's Room, and Nicola 14 and a half in RAH, that's at the very least Irish quads for poor old Pam.

Yes, as I said upthread, it really only works if the twins came early - which they might well have done.

Ginty's birthday is early January. We're never told when the twins' birthday is, but I think it must have been in mid-late July, soon after the end of the summer term.

I think Nicola finds Esther’s love for Daks as scary because it’s so intense. Clearly poor Esther doesn’t get much affection or interest from her parents so Daks is all she has. In fact her feelings for Nicola are similarly intense- look how she can’t face her after letting her down, as Esther sees it , over the solo in Attic Term. Nicola herself is momentarily annoyed but realises quite quickly that she should have expected it.

Didn't AF justify Karen and small children by saying she was OK when they were really small but not once they got to school age? Not sure where I read that, it might have been in 'The Marlows and Their Maker'. It was the 'smallest and frilliest' contestants Karen helped at the Merricks' party.

There's some inconsistency in Ann's attitude to animals. One of the early books says it was always Ann who was most upset when an animal died, but later she describes Esther's affection for Daks as 'babyish' (whereas Nicola thinks it is 'scary' - presumably because it is inevitable Esther will outlive him).

I do think sixth forms are looser at least in the earlier years. Not everyone took A levels, some had three years, some had retakes...
Karen's facility with small children does indeed fade away! I always feel sorry for Fob and co, plot device or not.

Doesn't Tim in that initial meeting scene on the train also grin at Nicola and say she likes the navy 'better than anything'? Does this ever come up again? Why would Tim have any particular feelings about the navy?)

Tim had rather offended Nicola by talking about the Marlows being 'frightfully esteemed' and Nicola was being short with her - I always took it that she'd sensed Nicola's pride when she said Giles was in the navy, and said it to thaw her out.

But I might be reading too much into it, and it was a potential strand of Tim's character that was never developed or 'lost on the cutting room floor'.

I don’t think Tim does have particular feelings for the navy let alone like it better than anything. I think at this stage she’s fascinated by the twins and wants to get in with them. So she makes up an interest that we never hear about again.

Maybe the pronunciation of Thalia has changed over the years. I only met one but it was definitely Tarlia.
The meetcutes are great! Miranda and Miss Cromwell in the play rehearsal is another nice one. And Patrick and Rowan at the christmas play.

As an Irish child reader, I never really grasped how Thalia could sound like 'Failure', even in a noisy train corridor. It seemed somewhat more probable when I had a child in London, many of whose friends, when small, pronounced 'th' as 'f'.

Even so, I just think AF couldn't resist the meetcute punchline, which establishes Lawrie as tactless but funny, and the Marlowverse as one in which the character in whose POV we chiefly are prefers boys to girls, despite being a girl.

(Doesn't Tim in that initial meeting scene on the train also grin at Nicola and say she likes the navy 'better than anything'? Does this ever come up again? Why would Tim have any particular feelings about the navy?)

Talking of AF meetcutes, could there be a worse one (though brilliantly written!) than when Nick meets Patrick up a tree freeing a trapped Jael (or is it Regina?) in Falconer's Lure? He's so foully rude to her, scoffs at her not knowing the precise vocabulary of hawking, and couldn't be less interested in her being quite badly cut up by his bird.

I like when Nicola and Esther meet when Sprog flies off from the train in the middle of Esther's abortive runaway attempt and walk to school together (though Esther is much more snubbing and less timid and well-meaning than she is later on?)

I always find the one at the start of the Nick/Miranda friendship slightly puzzling, and I like Miranda. OK, we're told that they'd gradually been growing friendlier since the Kitchen and Jumble days, but suddenly they're holding hands and swinging their joined hands together running down a path at school? It always sounds much younger than their age at that point.

I know a little Thalia and it's pronounced Tarlia. Her mum is half German, though, which may have some bearing on that.