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

Oh, you will enjoy it! As well as the cut parts from RAH, the conference papers are really interesting. AF lends herself really well to analysis! There's one by a senior naval type speculating on what sort of naval career Nicola could have in the modern Navy as it was at the time of publication, and another all about the various crushes that went on at Kingscote and how they compare to lesbian undertones in other girls' school fiction - I particularly liked those two, but they're all good.

I must read mine again. It was a birthday present from my mum who also likes AF, or at least she did before she lost her mind to dementia - I hadn't even known it was out - I remember my complete joy when I opened it and sat down to devour it.

Agree that Miranda isn’t that interested in Christianity and is certainly nowhere near converting over the Christmas play. I just think AF wasn’t that interested in portraying Judaism in much detail.

She’d converted by then, and was clearly hugely invested in being an anti-Vatican II trad Catholic, and in exploring Patrick’s faith, his (rather tiresome) pride in his recusant family heritage and his clashes with his progressive school etc.

And in Nicola’s confused attraction to Mass in the Merricks’ chapel, and in the various Marlows’ different attitudes to their own Anglicanism, from Ann’s devoutness, Pam skipping ASB services, Lawrie thinking everyone thinks Jesus and co are imaginary, Rowan saying to Patrick that she sometimes believes and sometimes doesn’t ‘for quite long stretches’ etc etc. Plus the opportunities for religious theatre given by the Play and the carol service.

Though I am always interested in the fact that AF sketches in more than one reference to anti-semitism (Miranda talking about inviting people home in the holidays and them suddenly finding they can’t come because their mother’s going out, and the ‘common little soul with the perm and the Jaguar’ who never stops saying ‘Whose father’s a rich Jew, then?’), but we never get to see that in action. That ‘common’ girl (whose name escapes me? Yvonne?) never makes an explicit anti-Semitic remark in front of the reader, though we see her being explicitly unpleasant, on the first day of term, about Miranda’s wealth, by remarks about the ‘exclusive model’ (the green and black dress Miranda travelled to school in because the au pair packed her uniform in her trunk), and the obvious cost of the Disaster she later gives to Nicola.

(Incidentally, does this mean Miranda returned to school in a couture outfit?)

Gosh, just seen the imaginary price myself 😮

I must give DH one of my periodic reminders of which few books out of my hundreds are worth something, should I drop dead.

Thank you for the link. When I saw @LookingThroughGlass mention it I went to see whether the book was available for purchase and recoiled from the (imaginary, no copies available) price.

But then, after reading your post, something stirred in my back brain, and I went to the distant bedroom containing the AFs and there it was. I must have bought it in my early looking-after-elderly-invalids days because it shows no signs of having been read.

There's also some antisemitism directed at Miranda by a 'common girl with a perm' (Joan Baker perhaps 😁) and Miranda talks about how she would invite friends to tea and they'd agree, only to tell her the following day in an embarrassed way that they couldn't come. She talks briefly about Zionism in Attic Term.

Gosh yes, especially if you compare the casual antisemitism of e.g. Dorothy Sayers' books, not that long before.

If anyone’s interested in reading the cut scenes from Run Away Home, they’re available in a book called Celebrating Antonia Forest, the papers of an AF conference held in Bournemouth in 2006, which is on Internet Archive.

https://archive.org/details/celebratinganton0000anto/page/158/mode/2up

As well as some bleak musings from Karen to Giles on Edwin beating the children after they’re discovered to have gone to Yetland Cove by themselves and lied about it (to help ‘Daniel’, which is what Edward Oeschli is called in this version, but they never admit it), and how she’d imagined the children would continue to live with their maternal grandparents, and that she mightn’t have married Edwin had she realised they’d be living with her, the cut scenes are chiefly notorious for containing the death of Buster and Patrick and Nicola kissing under the stage during the prep for the Noah’s Ark performance Rose, Chas and Fob are in.

Oh yes the discussion of the Yom Kippur war as mentioned earlier in the thread. And I suppose the whole Jesus was Jewish plotline. Probably quite a lot for a book of its time.

That's really interesting @PermanentTemporary. I wasn't sure how to phrase it and didn't want to offend.

The kids have a discussion of the Balfour Declaration in one of the books I think?

As an adult who was previously married to a Jewish man, and knowing that AF was a convert, I am now struck tbh by the total absence of Judaism in the stories. I really don’t think Miranda goes anywhere near converting in End of Term - she gives a perspective of an intelligent listener to an alien story being celebrated, and trying to make sense of it. I see why AF does it that way. My mother’s reaction to the vogue for prophet names among the babies of my ds’s generation, including my own ds who had a Jewish father, shocked me - she was really, really taken aback and mildly disapproving at the number of Isaacs for example. Just having a character who is known to be Jewish and some basic references to prejudice plus Miranda’s mother’s ’work with refugees’ is all AF does that I can remember. Very subtle. I wish I knew whether AF was afraid to do more than that or just not interested. I haven’t read the non Marlow historical books though.

I started reading AF at about 9 or 10 and was completely overwhelmed by the fact that some characters were ambivalent - until then, my childhood reading had been very (Blyton) Goodie and Baddies based.

I am reading King of Shadows to my Year 6 class at the moment and had a massive Deja vu to the Shakespearean details in The Player Boy.

think Karen married Edwin because she’d found she was out of her depth at Oxford and was running away from being just an also-ran. I imagine a few years later she woke up, said what on earth have I done, and promptly left him.

I think this, too. Karen was used to being a big fish in a small pond. At Oxford she was probably an average-sized fish in an enormous pond. There's also probably something in her sisters' comments that she panicked at the thought of being stuck in a teaching career.

In the 'cutting room floor' parts of Runaway Home that were published in 'Celebrating Antonia Forest' Karen has a conversation with Giles in which she mentions the possibility of divorcing Edwin, largely because of his violence towards his children.

Oh yes "my grief would be controllable". I still say or think that all the time. It's funny how phrases stick with you. I read the AF books 40 years ago.

I'm loving this thread (especially the economic and social history context) and wondering about a New Year's resolution to get hold of all the books again. I think the school stories are in my secret cupboard along with my Chalet school collection...

The Marlows inherit Trennels when Cousin Jon dies, and the story timeline at that point coincides with very high postwar rates of inheritance tax/estate duty, so money was relatively tight.

Trennels was entailed, so I'm not sure if it was subject to death duties in quite the same way. But any part of Great Uncle Lawrence's estate that wasn't entailed - investments or unentailed land - would have had to pay two lots of duties within a relatively few years.

I've always felt sorry for Lois Sanger and can absolutely see why she is as she is. From her perspective, the maddening Marlows are always in the way, centre stage, and she can never quite work out how to handle that. She's a bundle of resentment, but with some cause - the Marlows are insufferable at times. In real life, people who display Marlow-like unearned confidence, arrogance or exclusiveness just through belonging to a particular class or tribe can be very difficult to deal with.

The books strongly nudge us to find Ann annoying. She doesn't pick up nuance or read the room easily, but then she herself is the least nuanced personality of all the Marlow sisters. Straightforward, fairly uncomplicated people don't always pick up complexities in other personalities. Seems to me what her sisters feel towards her is unarticulated guilt (because she is genuinely good hearted whereas they are individually aware of their own failings) expressed mostly as irritation.

In an introduction to Antonia White’s wonderful Frost in May Elizabeth Bowen wrote scathingly of “the curl-tossing tomboys of the Fourth at St Ditherings” who were “insultingly unreal to any girl child who has left the nursery”, and said the only school story she could read with pleasure as an adult was What Katy Did at School.

I always think this means that she hadn’t come across Antonia Forest, because her characters are incredibly, recognisably real with flaws and faults and foibles. And even though they are flung into a variety of hair-raising plots over half a century they are still completely believable people.

Ginty kicking the sheets and gibbering in future years whenever she remembers her idiotic behaviour in Falconer’s Lure is so real. So are Marie Dobson’s and Lois Sanger’s capacity to lie to themselves to justify their actions or inactions. So is bookish, clever Karen, the mediocre head girl who “does her own thing and pooh to the rest of us.” And Giles, Nicola’s idol who turns out to have feet of clay when she breaks bounds (at his suggestion) to visit him.

I think Karen married Edwin because she’d found she was out of her depth at Oxford and was running away from being just an also-ran. I imagine a few years later she woke up, said what on earth have I done, and promptly left him.

Rowan, cool, competent and generally unflappable, wondering whether she should be revising more for O Levels and concluding she wasn’t the cramming type, and with a lovely, dry turn of phrase - “my grief would be controllable” and her astute summing up of Marmee’s sacrifice of her daughters’ Christmas breakfasts is admirable.

But they are all such satisfying characters even when one is longing to smack them - I’m thinking of Lawrie’s tantrum over Nicola and Peter buying the pony. Oh, and her getting so carried away playing the part of a dishy teddy girl that she forgets she’s meant to be duping the thug taking her to the cinema!

The character I always feel sorry for is Meg Hopkins, cheated of the Prosser scholarship she so plainly deserved despite the trap for heffalumps, because Miss Keith, not wanting to risk all the Marlow sets of fees walking into the sunset, pulled that piece of jiggery pokery. One can just imagine the debate - we can’t give it to Nicola without a row because Meg’s results are consistently better, ah, but we can give it to Lawrie for being a brilliant actress. Hang on, she messed up The Tempest…No, she was mature enough to recognise her limitations! And poor Meg goes away empty-handed to face her pushy father.

I need to buy The Player’s Boy from GGBP before they run out. We have a copy but one day DD will move out and the complete set of AFs will go with her (because I was daft enough to give them to her) so I’m slowly building up a second set because not having them in the house any more is a very horrible prospect to contemplate.

In Autumn Term comments about clothing/uniforms/hand me downs etc are somewhat shaped by clothes rationing, which was still in force when Autumn Term was published in 1948. Thus Nicola and Lawrie are still wearing their older sisters' uniform hand me downs at Kingscote after the uniform colour was changed, but decide they will rather like to be the last girls in the school wearing the old uniform, as by then it will have become a Special Marlow Thing to do so. Some of that wartime clothes rationing mentality also feeds through to some of the later books; here is a lot of make do and mend, clothes remodelling, hand me downs.

Lack of new clothes for the Marlows is also perhaps a nod to broader money difficulties for the landed gentry at the time. The Marlows inherit Trennels when Cousin Jon dies, and the story timeline at that point coincides with very high postwar rates of inheritance tax/estate duty, so money was relatively tight.

Thanks for sharing this.

Questionable parenting - making Nick and Lawrie continue wearing 'that dreggy uniform dress' when everyone else was wearing 'properly own clothes' at Kingscote in the evenings. Pam Marlow had said school was the only place they could wear them out. Why did they need to wear them out? While their home clothes (which were themselves multiple hand-me-downs) were lying unworn and being outgrown at home. At least Rowan spoke up for them after the Changear incident.

I need to get searching! I was just thinking my favourite bit of Marlow questionable parenting, was when the mum told Nicola they couldn't afford to keep sending both her and Lawrie to Kingscote and because her sister was a brat and she wasn't, she'd be the one having to leave the school.

It took me about 20 years to get Autumn Term, The Cricket Term, Peter's Room and The Attic Term (charity shops and library discards). Then, the internet arrived and I was able to get End of Term on eBay, then Girls Gone By started reprinting them and I was able to get all the others, plus the historicals and The Thursday Kidnapping.

As a teacher, I often think of the part where the scatty twin (Lawrie?) was booted from the school play part in favour of sensible Nicola, and Nicola is then upset to get lots and lots of criticism - the teacher eventually explains it's not because she's even worse, but because she's worth coaching...

Ah @AndresyFiorellait took me months of inter library loans and patience to complete the set! I wonder if it's easier now with all the online second hand book sellers.

I wonder why Virago or similar haven't republished them?

I am now boggling my head off trying to imagine explaining the point of that scene to my bike riding, TikTok and Traitors-loving 21st C teen!

Thanks @LookingThroughGlass, that was really interesting.