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 agree. I think Ginty's a weak character who's full of outward bravado but doesn't have any real moral courage. She'll always take the easy way out whether it's lying, dropping someone else in it, or allowing a misunderstanding to go uncorrected.
None of the adults in the books seem to have much time for her (apart from her parents obviously) and Patrick's father seemed to actively despise her.

But how old is Nick when Miranda passes on the dress? Fourteen-ish? It does sound childish - though what baffles me about the dress too is how, if it's elaborate enough to wear to a special Twelfth Night party, even the Wests' dopey au pair can have thought it was suitable for Miranda to sit about in during school evenings...? And M was planning to 'chop' it into a mini, which sounds even weirder! (Not that I have any real sense of what a 'supper dress' might have actually looked like...)

AF seems to have liked stripes, too - she gives Miranda an 'elegant black and emerald green striped dress', and Nick's Christmas present is a green and white striped party dress...

Mind you, the twins must have been built like twigs, given that Lawrie can wear a younger boy's monkey costume (how old is Edward Oeschli - 12?) and have it be baggy on her. Clearly no burgeoning curves...

Given that the book was set in the mid 70s, neither of those dresses really sound like something teenage girls would have been wearing. If they wore dresses at all they would probably have been Laura Ashley type pinafores or denim shirtwaisters.

By the way, I'm not English and when I was re-reading Autumn Term last night I couldn't work out if being in a Remove form was better or worse than being in a B Form. Does Remove mean that you just need some temporary extra help until you make up for lost time due to illness or whatever, while B means you've been definitely graded as less academic?

Yes, it was a temporary thing, girls moved out of it as they were ready - so Nocola moved into IIIA before Lawrie. So in some ways it was better than a B form. Though as Miss Cromwell said "A B form is just a B form, not a labour camp"

Thanks.

The childish might depend though on who wears it. As I was saying dress styles that made dd1 age 5yo look like she was dressed up as a baby, dd2, age 11yo (and is very tall with it) still look superb on, and not babyish.

I would think it wouldn't be the height of fashion and look pretty old fashioned. The Wests strike me as being somewhat old-fashioned in a lot of ways. They probably would also have that sort of dress specially made, perhaps to the grandmother's orders-in which case a dress that was fashionable when she was a child might well be what she orders.
Nicola is independent enough minded to like a dress that isn't in fashion, the old-fashioness off it might even appeal more. Lawrie probably wouldn't be seen dead in it.

I think what struck me was the girls looking at the dress and all commenting on how super it was. I remember being that age and it was all about following fashion and not being caught dead in anything frumpy or that looked like your mother had chosen it.
I agree Nicola wouldn't have slavishly followed fashion. But I think that would have been in a more 'couldn't care less. I just want to wear my jeans and baggy jumper' way'.
And I don't think Miranda would have worn grown up smart dresses back to school. I think she'd have worn something that would have been considered 'cool' amongst her friends. She was a leader but she was also very up to the minute and in tune with current trends.

It's one of the oddities of the books being set in the year they were written, aeons apart, isn't it? So not only do you have Ginty being afraid of going into enclosed spaces because of her experiences in the Blitz while her boyfriend and exact contemporary quibbles about the effects of Vatican 2 in his mid-teens, you have these very 1950s ideas about dress clashing with Lawrie dressing up as a punk and Nick and Miranda buying very seventies 'flash gear'.

The Marlows in general always seem to me to sit more easily in the 1950s than in the 70s and early 80s, mind you.

I think one of the things that strikes me as very 1950s about even the later books is the division between formal and informal clothes, even for teenagers. It's clear that fashion, apart from the Changear interlude, doesn't enter into the Marlows ' lives - all clothes are handed on to the younger ones, and anything new comes from Doris making over old dance dresses from The Chest, and then only for special occasions. What the majority of the twins' form wear as 'supper dresses' is what they wear 'when Mummy has friends to tea', a category we just don't have any more!

I shall anounce to mine that they must put on supper dresses when I have friends round. Ds can wear a shirt and tie and wait on us like the Maynard boys.
predicts rebellion

I agree. A lot of the attitudes to clothes doesn't really transfer well across the years. Teenagers in England immediately post war were probably very used to having to make do and mend and as long as clothes fitted properly and looked reasonably okay that was all that mattered. Whereas by the 70s and 80s fashion was a huge focus of teenagers' lives and peer pressure in this area was, and remains, huge.
AF seemed to recognise this and shoehorned in the Changear storyline, which otherwise served very little purpose. But in their day to day lives, the attitude to clothes of Nicola, Miranda et al seemed very much those of a previous generation.

Interesting. I belong to the Marlow sort of upper middle social class- and my siblings and I are not a million years away from Marlow children ages. And I have never thought the attitude to clothes in the books odd- I had "mummy having friends for tea" sort of dresses, and a party dress made by my mother at Christmas. And everything else was hand me downs (and I only had brothers can't imagine what I looked like!) or home made. Some of my friends had proper fashionable clothes but we tended to think they were rather common I think there was a sort of inverted snobbery about not thinking about clothes at all, and being as scruffy as possible. I remember my mother being quite sniffy about the Royal children being so very carefully smart.

Hope I don't sound nosy, but are you identifying with the earlier of later books. I would identify with the later ones and would have been a similar age to the Marlows at that time and, while as a young child I wore hand me downs, home made dresses, altered stuff etc. as a teenager I would have been mortified to wear the kind of stuff my mother chose for me. I used babysitting money and birthday presents to get jeans, denim skirts etc.

I was at boarding school in the 80s and the school and many parents were still in the Marlow mind set of changing into suitable home clothes at teatime (trousers allowed only at weekends, jeans never!) Whereas as soon as we got into Upper Fourth and were allowed on shopping trips, rules on suitability were relaxed and while some girls were obsessed with fashion, pretty much everyone had rebelled against twee dresses into at least jeans.

I also thought the Spring Term plot was unconvincing - if Ginty had ended up acquring some money, not stealing, she'd have convinced herself somehow, then that could have worked well. Bunch of kleptomaniacs at my school - almost invariably from the wealthiest backgrounds. I caught out a girl who shared my room, whose dad owned half the town, because I'd been pre-warned to always memorise the numbers on my bank notes.

I was also at boarding school in the 80s. We were also banned from jeans and could wear trousers only at weekends. And that was right up to Upper 5 (Now year 11). In the junior school, In years 4-7 we had to wear dresses and white socks for Sunday tea.

Hak, how old are you (ish)? As I said, I don't think there's anything odd at all about the depiction of clothes, but it does seem to me to sit more easily with the earlier period setting. Or maybe more that the 'Mummy's friends to tea' dresses and associated attitudes clash with the interest in cheap fashionable 'gear' and tunics with pea-green swirls in Attic Term, which (as you suggest) I would have thought might have been regarded as 'common', the way Miranda characterises the anti-Semitic girl as something like 'a common little soul with a perm and a Jaguar'.

(Nick must have looked like the Bay City Rollers in her tartan trousers and frilly shirt...?)

I think the author wanted Ginty to be caught doing something that we would see as morally bad but not really bad. She couldn't put stealing in that light for a children's book really (even if mostly written for fans).

I can imagine the head of a girls' school overreacting to such a thing. Even in the 80s/90s our local headmistress was rather prone to that. Like the time she stated "our gals would consider themselves above the silliness of red nose day". They proved her wrong by going on stike and rioting all day instead . The local paper had a field day on that one.

I think maybe I'm looking at it from an Irish perspective. Something like sneakily reading one of your sister's letters might get you a mild telling off from your mother, but that would be it. Eavesdropping and being a bit nosy aren't necessarily admired, but they're not seen as hugely dishonourable acts either, so I found it a bit strange and OTT.
But I do take your point DeWee. I can remember relatively minor stuff being blown out of proportion by Head Nuns (I went to a convent) who had lost their sense of perspective.

I would see reading the letter as a bit rude, but much worse that she had to go into the locker to get it. If Nicola had left it out, and she'd twitched it to look at it, that would be nothing more than "don't do it again". The fact that she had to deliberately get it out makes it much worse for me. It was a deliberate act to read the letter.

I did have a situation not too dissimilar, which has just come to mind. I borrowed my bf (now dh) computer at college to write a letter to a friend. It was a vey private letter where she'd asked for advice over a sensitive issue. I put a lot of thought, and a lot of my private thoughts as well as a situation I had been in, into the letter. I wanted it on the computer as I could alter it as I went through, and in case she needed me to follow up. Dh created a folder on the computer under my name, and a second one in that as "letters", which I saved it in as "private letter".
Dh lent the computer to his db to write up something about 3 months later (so the letter was no longer on the recent document list) we went out for the day and came back to find him happily sitting there reading my letter.
If I'd left a paper copy out, or it had been top of the list of recent documents I could understand it, but he had to have deliberately gone into my folders, and my letters to find it. That was what I found totally unacceptable.

He got his commupance though. I took one look and switched the computer off at the plug-and he hadn't saved his work, which I didn't know.
Dh wouldn't let him back in either as that showed he wasn't trustworthy-what else he'd looked at while he was there I don't know.

I still don't think it was a suspension issue though.

I'm actually reading The Marlows and their Maker now. It's made me want to read the non Kingscote books even more. I wish they weren't so damn expensive.

In a way the Marlows (at least in the earlier books) are very like a typical Noel Streatfeild family. They have that air of shabby respectability, and the talented actress, the reluctant singer, the strong moral code etc. In a lot of ways Lawrie reminds me of Lydia Robinson (although Lydia had a much more attractive personality).

The reaction to the letter-reading jolted me totally out of Spring Term, which was a shame as so much of the rest of it was fantastic - the day girls, Winnie, Helen Shaw, finally getting more of Ginty's bitchy friends. But the letter bit struck me as more similar to Dimsie and her mother being ostracised for allegedly cheating at cards in the 1920s, than to anything likely in the 80s.
Given how we all knew who the kleptos were and regarded their thefts as an annoying foible, and how being caught only led to expulsion if by police or if a victim went to staff (and then the thief wasn't one of the shining lights of sports teams), I'm sure there could have been a sympathetic storyline where Nicola owed Ginty pennies, Ginty needed to pay some good cause, 'borrows" some cash, for some reason is embarrassed to come clean, perhaps because the judgemental Ann is in the room, then ends up snowballing her not-actual-lies.

I think the staff are just fed up of Ginty; maybe they also think it's a equal bet if she goes to the good or the bad and want to frighten the bad out of here?

I'm re- reading Spring Term now, and have only just got to the Ginty/ Ann confrontation, so I am not sure if I am remembering it correctly.

I think Keith was certainly fed up with Ginty! In Attic Term she does tell her that while below the third form you might be able to get three conduct marks before being suspended/expelled it would not count in her case. And to be fair, going through someone's locker, sister or not, and reading a letter and lying would probably be enough to make Keith even more fed up!!!
I think Ginty just dug herself into a hole and kept digging!!!