I have just blued £30 on Nicola bloody Marlow

[Failedspinster]

Help me. I'm addicted. By hook or by crook I obtained two Antonia Forest paperbacks at low prices. It was not enough. Now I've just bought another for thirty sodding quid I can ill afford, comforting myself with the knowledge that I can always economise on clothes.

I know I am not alone. Please tell me your stories of absurd expenditure of money and effort to secure a favourite.

Mind you, the Marlows are somewhat to the right of Atilla the Hun- except for Ann, who is despised for it.............

Claudie?? Don't you mean the servant that Patrick decides would be a useful body to practice on? How is he going to allow her to alter his thinking or his life?

I think she only appears so that we know Patrick won't become a priest.

I'm not at all rational about Patrick - obviously i had a crush on him myself for a bit

I thought Claudie offered and Patrick said no?

Most of my fictional crushes would be pretty obnoxious if they were real. Payrick is at least more realistic than Peter Wimsey. He's just a bit of a right-wing young fogey, of the type who were Tories at university and who make up a proportion of the congregation at my Anglo-Catholic church. Come to think of it, I have a bit of a crush on the Bishop of Burnley, who is a modern, Anglican equivalent, who refuses to accept the ordination of women, but is rather good looking and passionate about his beliefs.

Actually, I'm sure she offered and he said no. I remember being impressed by the writing when I first read it.

I realized in later life that I think my crush was on Harriet, not Peter.....

Yes, when I used to go to mass at the Oratory in Oxford, the place was crammed with young fogeyish Patrick Merricks meditating on ancestral brushes with Blessed Edmund Campion and taking their indiscretions with the au pair to their confessors. I surreptitiously checked for golden eyes.

Was there another incident with Claudie? The one I remember is when the Merricks were staying in London and Claudia asked Patrick whether it was OK if her boyfriend stayed over. She then asked him about him and Ginty and was surprised they weren't sleeping together, and offered to have sex with Patrick. He said no-then she asked him why not. He said something about it only being OK when you're in love or of it's paid for and she said something mocking and French about being amazed he knew about that. Or am I misremembering? Dd has stolen my books and taken them to university with her!

No, only in our fevered imaginations. Or do people mean the bit where Patrick discovers he's been expelled, is so thrilled he dances Claudie around to the strains of Liliburlero, kisses her and then (with a Roger Moore style eyebrow quirk, I always imagine) says 'That was rather pleasurable. Might we do it again some time?'

Which, even for a Patrick-hater, is so youthful-pompous and redolent of zero sexual experience trying to sound caddish, it's almost endearing...

When I want to thwack him with a rolled-up newspaper is when Claudie brings him leftover creme brûlée and he tastes it and says something like 'I'll pass this', like the man from Del Monte, or the Times restaurant critic.

"When I want to thwack him with a rolled-up newspaper is when Claudie brings him leftover creme brûlée and he tastes it and says something like 'I'll pass this',"

I don't remember that

It's when Ginty is phoning him every night in Attic Term, and he wishes she'd phone either earlier or later because her call often coincides with Claudie bringing him some leftovers from dinner, because apparently he doesn't eat dinner with his parents because of his prep.

Which sounds a bit infantilising unless they go in for lengthy multi-course affairs every night...? Thank heavens there's a sexy, amoral French jolie laide waiting to help him grow up....

Oh I had forgotten that. But it must have been a bit tricky her phoning every night- and she is a bit of a lightweight, so they must have run out of things to say to each other And presumably he arranged the separate meals to avoid dining with his parents? I think they often had guests so the prep excuse would have been a good one. So cross at dd stealing the books-I want to read them all again!

I definitely had a crush on Harriet rather than Lord Peter.

It's funny (or at least I am amused) at how far to the right people like the Marlows and pretty much any Noel streatfield characters and every other popular 20s-50s children's book characters are. I was quite enjoying my bargain shocked it was even available let alone cheap copy of under the rainbow (streatfield as Susan Scarlett) and then the condescending paternalism became too glaringly obvious even for me to ignore.

I think maybe the impossibly smug way the characters just assume that of course they are always going to exist in this comfortable landed gentry type existence is what is so infuriating, once you notice it.

The bit in (I think?) Attic Term where Nick and Miranda, in their best shopping-trip uniforms and boaters, go to a hip secondhand clothes shop staffed by an amiable drug-dealing stoner who greets them with 'Shalom' is one of the funnier 'two worlds confront one another' moments' in AF. It's unobtrusively done, but confident Miranda is weirdly reluctant to go inside, and when Nick asks 'Do you have gear in our size?' I've always assumed that 'gear' is her attempt to be down with da kidz, 1970s Kingscote-style. Only they end up shopping him to the authorities, anyway.

And exactly why the two of them, having only gone into the shop to buy something for Miranda to wear in the evenings when their au pair packed her the wrong dress, ended up buying their entire form cool clothes on a whim, I've never quite understood. And Nick must have looked like the Bay City Rollers in her outfit!

Opened this thread because of the Marlows (obvs), but have to post to say I adore the Bishop of Burnley, Broomstick

Yes- when it comes down to it, Attic Term is just In the Fifth at Malory Towers or Mary-Lou at The Chalet School but by someone with a talent for writing, an imagination and a gift for characterization.

Sobering, isn't it.

Is Mary-Lou at the Chalet School the one where there's a new girl (Naomi?) who has a disability and gets strong-armed from agnosticism into Christianity by the insufferable Mary-Lou in an avalanche?

Enid Blyton is crammed with unpleasant class stuff. Nouveau riche girls in the school stories always get their comeuppance, getting ticked off for speaking 'like the dustman's daughter' or expelled for having a father called Cheeky Charlie with a fast car car who doesn't defer to the school governors stealing.

Though the bit that fascinated me about Jo stealing the money after Matron had confiscated hers was that she stuck it up the leg of her knickers. At eight, I wasn't envisaging giant, well-elasticated 'strong' knickers, and was imagining Jo rummaging around in her scanties...

It's only OK to be a semi-prole if you're exotic and do cartwheels and ride random horses bareback all the time, like the half-Spanish circus girl.

As long as you are half exotic/foreign you are allowed eccentricity. But only the very old wealthy British characters are allowed even a smidgen of real individualism

It's not so much the Marlows being right-wing as the fact that class structures haven't really changed that much between The Player's Boy and say Cricket Term - and then Attic Term bumps into the 70s rather violently.

Naomi-as-plot is in Trials for the Chalet School, but almost any of the post-war titles could be used. I recall the first book with Mary-Lou and she meets the eight-year-old triplets who tell her she must be going to their aunt's school. ML says she doesn't know where she's going and they explain that it's the only school around "except for the village school, and you won't go there"!

Blyton did try to make clear that being poor or nouveau wasn't bad in itself; it was pretending not to be that was the grievous sin. Snobby Angela who didn't want to be friends with skint Eileen was criticised as much as Pauline or Eileen who pretended to be better-off than they were. Though still plenty of prejudice left - The Six Bad Boys always gets me as it's really well-researched and based on true news reports - so at the end the nice middle-class protagonist who fell in with a bad lot is let off by the juvenile court and his widowed mother rehoused on a nice new estate. The working-class kids get probation, one goes to foster care, but one lad, living with a violent grandfather, is sent to Borstal - because he was Irish so what do you expect?!!

It's Mr Merrick I love. Recusant family ( sooo romantic) , principled, obv good seat on a horse, well read and civilised, views Patrick's manners as important, sees straight through Ginty... Peter Wimsey without the irritating bits.

I love the letter that's sent expelling Patrick. I won't call it hypocritical because I think it's sincere but it's so Series 2 in Old Anglican Speak, deliciously awfully vomit- makingly yucky.

Giles, ah yes, Giles. I think you are supposed to find him attractive. I think the portrayal is good: he would have been furious to have to deal with a shame-making over-literal little sister. Like you, Bertrand, I used to have to see too many of that type. I think he is at least intelligent, whereas a lot of the people I used to have to dance with were less intelligent than their livestock. He is obviously going to grow into his father when he has learned a bit more about management.

The bit where I like Mr Merrick is when he's having a post-hunting breakfast with Patrick, Ginty and Nick, and P and G are being snide about Nick's riding skills and she's still shaken from realising the other two are Gondaling on the hunt and almost jump on her, and Mr M's eyebrows 'comment unfavourably on this breach of hunting etiquette'

Also the bit where he compares Ginty, not very favourably, to the Lady of Shalott, and says, quietly devastatingly, that it's evens whether she goes to the good or the bad and he doubts it'll be any great shakes either way. Presumably this is less casual than it sounds, and in fact he's trying to stop Patrick tying himself up to the lightweight Helen of Troy next door in his teens?

Olive, spot on for both.

I agree Olive.

There's requests for prompts for more Forest fic at the moment - archiveofourown.org/collections/antonia_forest_fanworks_2017/requests

I like to think that, after getting the navy out of her system, Nicola would have gone on to become something like a big wheel in Amnesty or a legal aid lawyer, and Ginty never speaks to her again.

Surely Nicola ended up as the First Sea Lord?

Or took early retirement and skippered a Tall Ship?