Antonia Forest

[Fallingovercliffs]

For some reason the Marlowe series passed me by as a child. However, in recent months I have managed to buy all four of the Kingscote books (with only Cricket Term costing a slightly eye watering amount) and I cannot believe what I was missing.

They are so realistic you can almost smell the chalkdust and feel the tedium of a long afternoon in a stuffy classroom. The girls, with their shifting friendships and changing group dynamics, are totally believeable and Miss Cromwell has to be the most authentic sounding teacher in any school fiction. I also love the way AF shows teachers and prefects as flawed, human and sometimes prone to favouritism or poor judgment, not the all seeing, all knowing fonts of wisdom they usually are in other fictional schools such as Malory Towers or the Chalet School.

Any other Kingscote fans out there? I've just ordered Sally Hayward's Spring Term and hope it lives up to the work of the original author.

I discovered AF at 10 with End of Term and bought Traitor. Couldn't get any of the others till I was 18 and gradually built y collection.
Still a firm fan at 50 and regularly retread.
Spring Term is so good you forget it is not AF!

I've just read Spring Term and really enjoyed it. However, I don't really think the whole business of the 'reading a private letter' rang very true for a story set in the 1980s. Yes, it wouldn't be condoned but the 'shock horror', headmistress announcing it in front of the school, girl being suspended just seemed OTT to me. Especially when it was between two sisters who shared a bedroom. I also think Ginty's friends totally overreacted in the end. It just wouldn't have been such a big deal at that time.

It does say that she was suspended due to the lies rather than the actual letter reading.....I think that it was Rowan who told Nicola that.

I agree, but Miss Keith making a public announcement after breakfast, everyone talking about it, her friends' horror when they find out etc etc. I think realistically Miss Keith would have politely told Miss Redmond to have some sense. I'm sure there would be far bigger problems to deal with in a large girls' school than one sister reading another sister's letter. AF never presented Miss Keith as an ideal headmistress and it was always clear she had her flaws, but she always did it in a realistic way and this, to me, just didn't ring true.

What I found interesting is that I read them as an adult and loved them. I gave them to dd at what I though was the right age- 12ish, and she found them dull and couldn't see the point. Then she read them again at 16, loved them, and took them all to university with her as comfort reads. I think they are too sophisticated for their target market.

I agree. They're so subtle that I think a lot of it would go over the heads of a child. And half the pleasure is seeing the reality in the staff and pupils; on one's perfect, not the staff, the prefects, the popular girls. They're all flawed in different ways. Also a lot of dilemmas or hurts just don't get resolved and remain as part of the baggage people carry on with them through life.

AF was my absolute favourite author when I was a kid. I read them all many times. I still have most of the school books but I'm scared to reread them in case I don't love them.

neolara, I think you will still love them. They are proper comfort reading for adults as Hakluyt describes.

Was Spring Term set in the 80s? I seem to recall there were a few comments about Simon Le Bon to anchor it to a period in time. Given Forest's incredibly elastic approach to time, I would have been tempted to set it back in the 1950s where the reading of a letter might seem a terrible breach of trust. Surely in the real 1980s a boarding school would have been dealing with girls having their hair permed and trying to cop off with Prince Charles. Or at least Prince Andrew.

I agree tribpot. The central storyline of the letter would have fitted much better into a 1950s setting. As would the rather prim and innocent conversation on the beach between Ginty and her friends about Patrick. In fact Ann's reaction to finding Ginty reading the letter would have been ridiculous in the 1980s. I think her parents would have been more worried about her over scrupulous moral code than Ginty reading a letter addressed to her sister from a mutual friend.

But Ann's reaction is not ridiculous to Ann. It is exactly how she would have reacted because that is who she was whether is was 1980 or 1950. And I think Ginty had already pushed her luck the term before...

I think Ann would have been very sanctimonious about it and given Ginty a lecture and tried to persuade her to 'confess' to Nicky. But when Ginty refused I think she would have been very sad and sorry about it and left it at that; and always have been that bit of disappointment and disapproval causing a wedge between her and Ginty.
To me that's the difference between Sally Hayward's book and AF's writing (and in fairness SH made it very clear in her introduction she wasn't trying to be another AF but just wanted to explore possible further storylines for the charactes). But AF often knew when to just let something drift, without any resolution and that added a huge level of reality to her books.

I love these books. DH sourced and bought me a complete set one Christmas - I don't think I stopped reading for a week as I did a complete, back to back reread.
I always reread End of Term at this time of year because I love the description of the carol service in the Minster.

I'm rereading Charlotte Sometimes at the moment - a well-loved childhood friend which I haven't read for ages. Emily (aged 10 in 1918) uses the phrase 'snubs to you and utterly squash' which I've always thought of as a peculiarly Marlow turn of phrase. Was it in more general use amongst schoolgirls than I'd realised? Or had Penelope Farmer picked it up from AF?

I've just been chatting to dd. She says she thinks th only book she's ever read that does teenage friendships better than AF is Northanger Abbey!

And this is a girl who chain-read written for teenagers books with pink and bits of foil covers.

I didj't really see it as set in the 80s. I would have put it earlier.
But my experience of all girls schools even in the 80s is that the head could do a very good line in "our gals do not behave like that", so I don't have an issue over that.

SPOILERS

I thought the reaction was very Ann-she wanted to put it right among her sisters for what she saw was a dreadful thing to do. But her reaction is "of course Ginty will want to confess and get forgiveness", and then when she didn't get that, she was all at sea.
I did feel the conversation with Miss Redmond was a bit forced, and I didn't get her going to Miss Keith over it. Miss Redmond sort of dismissed it, so why go to higher authority-maybe going to Ginty's form mistress. Perhaps Ann could have disturbed Ginty and Ginty shoved it down her blouse to hide it, and is caught later when Nicola is looking for it.

The other bit I didn't get was why Ginty had to make up the story that it was going across the garden. I would have thought her initial story about the hair clip would have been much better:
"Nicola had borrowed my hair slide earlier, and when I asked for it back, she was in a hurry, so told me to take it back myself. It had fallen to the bottom of the drawer, so I had to take her letter folder out to find it, and I was seen putting it back".
If she'd said that then I suspect her friends would have totally believed her and all would have been fine. They would still have seen her as a huge miscarriage of justice. I know she wanted to seem heroic, but I think little hedging excuses were much more her line than whoppers-Lawrie would have gone for the huge whopper, probably pretty much believing it herself by the end.

I actually thought Miss Keith came across very badly in this book. Previously she had been portrayed as a Headmistress that the pupils held in awe, if not in much liking - which I found very realistic (how many of us really had head teachers like Miss Annersley or Miss Grayling?) But in Spring Term she came across as quite nasty and very heavy handed, dealing with a relatively minor issue in a way that would cause maximum embarrassment, distress and isolation to a teenage girl. In RL I think the Marlowe parents would have been far more annoyed with the school than with their daughter.

But Miss Keith always comes across badly- remember "forgettable river smell"? Always loved that description!

Don't remember that one? Which book was that in?

I thought she was quite unfair on Nicola in Attic Term when she called her in after the phone incident with Ginty and almost out of the blue started going through her record and rehashing 'crimes' from terms ago. But I wondered was it because she saw potential and a strength of character in Nicky that she didn't see in Ginty and was anxious to keep her on the straight and narrow and nip in the bud any possibility of Ginty being a bad influence on her (as she was the one who had pressured Nicky into making the initial phone call from the office). It seemed to be echoed in Patrick's father stating that Ginty would either go to the bad or the good, but it wouldn't be spectacular in either case.
But I can't see any redeeming excuse for the way Miss Keith treated Ginty in Spring Term.

Keith was very unfair to Nicola in Attic Term. Her crime was much less than Ginty's but she got the same punishment,,,

Adored them as a child and I still think AF is an astonishing novelist now, as an adult. I have copies of all, from GGB and charity shop finds, and read them regularly. I think the Shakespearean books are particularly good, and Traitor perhaps the weakest. I seem to often be alone in AF discussions in actually reading the fantasy bits of Peter's Room.

Trennels LJ community is great for discussing the finer points - look up the archives for sometimes vitriolic, very well-informed arguments about such minutiae as whether Mrs Marlow was unfair to blow the proceeds of an ancient family tiara on buying her and Ginty horses, or what exactly the lovely cream silk dress Nick inherits from Miranda West can possibly have looked like! (Because cream silk fine pleats falling from a high yoke always sounds like an expensive nightie to me...)

I know. What puzzled me though was that in Cricket Term she seemed to go out of her way to ensure Nicky could stay on at the school - by basically manufacturing a reason to give Lawrie a scholarship so that the Marlowes would only have one set of fees to pay for the twins. Whereas in Attic Term she seemed to almost despise Nicky. That was why I wondered if we were meant to see some ulterior motive in her treatment of Nicky and giving her a conduct mark for something fairly minor.

I can't' remember which book, falling- I'll have a look shortly. Rowan said it after she had left school.....she was talking to Nick.

Miss Keith does come across as unfair as a whole.
Autumn term: She has a go at Karen for Nicola dropping her knife out of the window and stopping the chair. They comment that she "likes" to have the prefects in trouble.
Spring term: The casting of the play is totally blamed on her.
Cricket term: You get the Jan Scott comments-how she refused to do a voluntary job and was written off for the rest of the time at school.
Attic term: Giving Nicola the same punishment didn't ring true to me going in with her comments on Autumn term to Karen on being responsible for the younger ones. From that you would have expected her to come down harder on Ginty not necessarily let Nicola off scot free, but definitely Ginty bear the brunt of the punishment.

Wasn't it Miss Cromwell who liked to keep the prefects down, not Miss Keith?

I think Miss Keith is generally depicted as not the best head. Witness the nonsense of deciding on play casting and games team membership by character rather than talent.

I thought Spring Term was good, but I think if AF had written the follow-up book she would have left the relationship between Nick and Patrick much more low key. Ginty's lies do ring true, as they're very much in line with her letting Monica think that she'd messed up the diving for her sake.

You're right, it was Miss Cromwell. My mistake.

But Ginty doesn't actually lie right out about the diving cup. She says "may be" and "might have" so deliberately making them think she had, but kind of not actually stepping over the line of a lie, and if she was challenged she'd have said all wide eyed "but I never really said I had".
Which is why the hair clip reason would have gone with her character well. She knew it wasn't true, but by finding the hair clip and taking it, she could then pretend that was what happened.
I think her own moral compass was that as long as she didn't outright lie, it was fine. The garden was an outright lie; the hair clip, whereas not true, I'm sure she would have told it as a "Nicola had borrowed a hair clip, I needed it so went to get it back... I was seen putting her letter case back" so not actually saying she had read/hadn't read a letter. If they'd directly challenged her then I bet she'd have said something non-committal like "well Ann thought I must have" or "why would i want to read her letters?" not a deny.

I imagine the dress to be a high square yoke-but not empire line, so above the natural waist, but not really high, and lots of very tiny pleats. Like this only with the skirt pleated.
www.fashion-era.com/images/Children/cc1825hands.jpg

It's a style that either suits or doesn't suit, as it's quite childish.
My dd1 never looked good in high waists, although generally she was very easy to dress. By the time she was 4 or 5 that sort of style made her look like I was dressing her up too young. My dd2 is 11yo and still looks lovely in that style. (but dd1 looked lovely in flounces and bows, and dd2 looks much better in simple styles).