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

[CreativeGreen]

Apologies if the quotation isn't quite right there: no Forests to hand.

Inspired by a post on another thread, I need to talk about the Marlows. Is Rowan spectacularly awful, and Lois an Unsangered heroine? Is Giles ghastly? (I think yes). What's your Marlow Family Liking List?

(I will be posting and running for now but I have many thoughts and wanted to start the thread while I remembered to)

I did. I also read Changing Times and The Fortunate Few. Incredibly well written and the plots/ideas have stayed with me. I did find them very cold though.There was certainly no sugar coating.The Antonia Forest connection passed me by completely.

The twins are at home until Autumn Term so that's really less than a year until they move to Trennels when she would have been on her own, and they were in London then.

I hadnt really thought much about Pam. I would guess she was one of those who has suffered/benefited from being not very visible to those around her all her life. I would guess that she manages to look busy while not doing all that much, because she’s mostly ignored. Bits of housework and horse grooming but much more often sitting and gossiping with those doing the work, meaning that she doesn’t lose employees. Riding without fail every day. Writing letters- if you are writing every week to all relatives including husband and multiple boarding children plus a bit less often to lots of elderlies and old friends, plus paying all the bills by cheque and doing the accounts - to be fair to her that did add up in the old days, plus frequent trips to the post office for more stamps and stationery, trips to the bank for cash (we forget how much effort was involved in making sure you had adequate cash in the house) and as the woman of the house she was probably supposed to do all the food shopping and meal planning which isn’t nothing. Going to the lending library and the WI. Not to mention clothes making and mending - if you rely on hand me downs which we all did, that takes some doing. I can imagine Pam being very inefficient about all that with each food trip taking up several attempts at lists and planning and moaning about doing it, then doing it, then having up go back or ring up the butcher and fishmonger for bits you’ve forgotten, discussing at length what could replace it and getting that instead. And deciding which rooms and beds to make up or shut down as children and guests came and went, finding enough decent clean bedding, putting flowers and biscuits in the room, replacing lightbulbs in the bedside lamp might take all afternoon and then it’s time to peel the potatoes and draw the curtains and find the tonic. Mainly because I would have been like that too.

I think I remember a thread on Trennels called something like 'what does Pam Marlow do all day?'

I’m quite intrigued by the relationship between the Merricks and the Marlows too (beyond Patrick and Ginty/Nicola). Do they get on or is it another toleration due to being of a similar social class? And are they the same social class?

In the 16th century books, the Merricks were gentry and the Marlows were yeomen. I think the Marlows had moved up a little over the centuries, but the Merricks' house was never a farmhouse as Trennels was.

It must have been a big change for Pam moving to Trennels. She presumably had her own life in London. The children didn't notice it so much being away most of the year, and Rowan was busy with the farm, but Pam must have been on her own a lot, not knowing anyone local. The Merricks were mostly in London, so no help. Which book is it where Rowan says they're beginning to be invited to things because people have realised they are there to stay?

she was probably supposed to do all the food shopping and meal planning which isn’t nothing.

Rationing was still in force in the early books, which would have made it more complicated.

I suppose Mrs Bertie would have done all the meal planning when it was just Great Uncle Lawrence and Cousin Jon, but she probably thought that when there was a Lady of the House, it was her job.

Which book is it where Rowan says they're beginning to be invited to things because people have realised they are there to stay?
Peter's Room - I only know because I just re-read it this week.

And yes, the Merricks have clearly been posher for longer than the Marlows - the description of their house in PR, with its minstrel's gallery and ballroom with little sofas, not to mention the 'gaudy' chapel..... But I suppose by the mid-twentieth century they're both broadly on a par with all other well-heeled families in the area who sell each other horses and have 'hoolies' at Christmas, in contradistinction to the families in the village who help out at said parties and whose children populate the village school.

I've just got out my copy of The Marlows and the Traitor, and the passage goes:

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 feet of wall. That still left eleven feet no, a bit less because her arms would lengthen her --

And then she uses her cardigan to shorten the drop, but as her knot is not the proper 'round turn with two half hitches' that Peter or Nicola would have made, it gives way and even though she's let herself down the length of the cardigan till she's holding on by the bottom sleeve, she still 'fell the last few feet'.

ETA: Sorry, AF's actual punctuation causes strikethrough on Mn!

That bit in Changing Times when Victoria timetravels to her own future and discovers she's entered into exactly the same kind of abusive, unequal marriage as her mother, for the same reason, is brilliantly chilling. And even leaving aside the relationship with the future Daniel, the scenes where she has to get up, tend to 'her' two children whom she's never met, make them breakfast and get them to school in a flat and in an place she's never seen before, under the eye of a hostile husband and a child who instinctively knows she's not really her mother, is absolutely petrifying.

I read Changing Times years ago & I’d completely forgotten about it until this post.

Changing Times is fantastic - really wise and smart, but also very very funny. The bit where she goes back to being a one year old and astounds the woman who's chatting babytalk in her face by screaming 'piss off with your stinking bad breath'

The Trennels that the 20thc Marlows live in was built by an ancestor who made a pile in the slave trade, and the older Trennels house was the farmhouse where the Tranters, and later the Dodds, live, isn't it? So the money that raised them from yeomen to gentry or gentry-adjacent was far more recent than the source of the Merrick wealth (presumably land?) But yes, much on a level by the mid-20thc, enough for Nicola to be only mildly struck by the house's magnificence when she's first inside it.

I always note the rather feudal bit where Mrs Bertie and Doris and lot of other women from the village go to 'lend a hand at the Merricks' do' aka the Twelfth Night ball, and we see Doris coming with the Marlows' wraps and coats during the geese scene, so Doris and Mrs B, who are offered a lift home by Mrs Marlow, stay to the very end, after all guests other than the Marlows have gone home and Mrs B is up early enough to cook all the hunters a huge breakfast in the morning.

Helena Merrick says something, apparently more to Pam Marlow than to Doris and Mrs Bertie, because PM has just offered to drive them home, like 'They've been the greatest possible help -- I'm everlastingly grateful'.

I mean, why? If large numbers of village women do this every year, can the Merricks have been paying them all? If not, why?

ETA I always notice it because there's a terribly sad Edna O'Brien short story set at around the same period in which a young girl thinks she's actually invited to a party at a rather grander house in the neighbourhood, and gets all dressed up in a dress that was sent in a parcel by a relative who lives in the US, only to discover when she gets there, bringing a present of fresh cream, that she's essentially the unpaid hired help, carrying around refreshments and helping in the kitchen.

I'd imagine the Merricks would pay cash in hand or I can't see the village women trooping there every year. Pin money / supplementing wages. Probably not at an advertised or negotiated rate but expected and handed over

Yes!! I loved Wall of Words, The Fortunate Few, The Middle of the Sandwich and in particular Changing Times. Also the brilliant short story collection Here Tomorrow, Gone Today, which mixes then-contemporary (80s) school stories and stories with a futuristic setting. There’s one story in particular set in an imaginary future where an elderly pop star has made it fashionable to look old, and teenagers are using cosmetics and surgery to change their appearance to look elderly. It has some interesting parallels with a certain modern phenomenon…

I hadn’t clocked that Wall of Words is dedicated to AF - I wonder if they ever met?

The Fortunate Few was in my primary school library, and I still remember it quite well - it was stronger stuff than most of what I'd read up till that point. But I haven't read any of TK's other works, and it looks like they're in that annoying gap where they're too old to be in print, not well known enough to have more recent or Kindle editions, and not old enough to be out of copyright and available cheaply.

In terms of the girls' school story tradition, the books that had the most AF resonance for me were Evelyn Smith's books, particularly (for an obvious reason) Seven Sisters at Queen Anne's. Her girls read books, took likings (and dislikings) to each other, sometimes broke rules in a good cause. Any other admirers out there?

The Fortunate Few is astonishingly dark for a children’s novel.

Oh, yes - I have read all the Tim Kennemores mentioned. Changing Times, The Fortunate Few and Wall of Words are all brilliantly written.

In CT I absolutely loved the way Victoria reacted to going back in time - firstly, it taking time for her to realise she had when she went back six months, from March to October so there was no startling change in the weather. I must have re-read that book about a hundred times, I still enjoy it every time.

WoW is fascinating to read now because of the very different attitudes towards dyslexia in the early 1980s - I can't imagine dyslexia as severe as described in the book going undiagnosed for so long. Does anyone else who's read it think that Mr Tate sounds like someone who would nowadays have been diagnosed as autistic or possibly 'AuDHD' ? With his overwhelming special interest in the Russians, love of puzzles, chronic inability to finish anything except the Mephisto crossword, and inability to read other people "if you tell him you're hurt, he's just rather puzzled"?

The Fortunate Few is one of the most horrifying children's books I can think of (that is not a criticism). The ending is particularly chilling, and the realisation that Jodie is essentially dead inside and will probably become another Miss Amey.

The influence of AF's style is particularly strong in Wall of Words - also themes, in the way the story of the Grand Duchesses is brought in, just as AF brings in literary or historical themes, and the Renton Heritage has echoes of the Last Ditch although the Tates really do need the money, and the feeling of security that is lost when the Renton Heritage is sold doesn't seem to affect the Marlows with the Last Ditch, other than Lawrie - and even Lawrie is more upset about being the only horseless carriage now Ginty has Catkin.

Kim's friendship in WoW with the boy next door (David?) has echoes of Nicola and Patrick, too.

This is making me want to reread Wall of Words! Must see if it’s available second hand online.

Yes, it does - David is richer than her, and an intelligent, 'thinking man' type.

Kim and Nicola have a lot in common, sporty, intelligent, resourceful but inclined to have 'blind spots' over people they admire (Kim - Mr Tate, Nicola - Giles). In some ways Kim resembles Rowan more than Nicola, she has a Rowan-like detachment and cynicism.

Frances is something of an Ann-type and Anna is not unlike Lawrie in many ways, not least in being somewhat stage-struck, though Lawrie isn't appearance-vain like Anna - I can't imagine Lawrie wanting to be a Dairy Princess.

I can't imagine Lawrie wanting to be a Dairy Princess.

I can imagine her acting 'being a Dairy Princess'.

The ending of Wall of Words where Kim is disillusioned about her father is particularly effective and surprisingly realistic for a children’s story published in 1981. I’m not sure what happened to TK. The last of her books that I’ve got is Circle of Doom (2001) which is fun but nothing like as good as her earlier books.

There’s very little about her online - no author website or anything. She was apparently born in 1957 so not terribly old. I wonder why she stopped writing.

Another author for AF fans to look out for is Jenny Overton, who wrote two books , Creed Country and The Nightwatch Winter, about an incredibly Marlow like family. There are lots of siblings, Catholicism, religious difference, a dramatic production, friendship between one of the girls and a solitary, prickly boy, - so many similarities that the author must have been influenced by AF. They’re very good if you can get hold of them .