"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)

When AF wrote about the horses, she didn't know that she was going to want to use the family fortunes as a plot device in Cricket Term.

No, this is true - but then again, when she did use them in CT she knew she'd done the horsey business in RMF, and being the kind of writer she was, I bet she knew the inferences she was inviting about old Pam.

Also love when Nick is telling Janice about it, and Janice asks if it might be her mother flapping about nothing, Nick says 'if it's Daddy too it must be real'.

After reading the likes of Mallory Towers, Nick, Lawrie, Tim and Miranda were so refreshing!
Is anyone else like me who got the school books from the library as a child and was confused not by jumping decades but to passing references to massive life events not included in the books? I think maybe the series I read was a reprint only of the school ones. I never came across any of the other books to read even once I realised they existed. I assume they are out of print now.

Also often think about Crommie basically explaining Israel/Palestine in a maths lesson 😀

I think maybe the series I read was a reprint only of the school ones. I never came across any of the other books to read even once I realised they existed. I assume they are out of print now.

Penguin/Puffin did the school ones but not the non-school ones. Faber did the non-school ones but I think they went out of print quite quickly.

Girls Gone By, a specialist small publisher, has redone all of them, but don't know if they're currently in print. There might be 2nd hand copies around.

It's decades ago now, but I still remember the thrill when I found Falconer's Lure in a library sale. I'd been wanting to re-read it for ages.

I think 'none of them care' is slightly overstating the position. None of them quite know what they should be feeling when someone they disliked dies. Some go for expressing regret because they feel they ought, others try harder to articulate their feelings more accurately. When Lawrie says she wishes no-one had told them then they'd just have forgotten about Marie, this is 'more heartless than even Tim cared for'. But Lawrie is generally a self-centred character.

Of the 'A' form, only Nicola and Lawrie have a genuine reason to dislike Marie (because she lied about the hike). Lawrie has blabbed to Tim about this, but there's no evidence it has gone further. The others dislike her in a herd-like way because she's grubby and over-eager to be liked.

Marie's story is tragic. When she lied about the twins having waved to her on the hike, it was very much an impulsive decision, not a calculated one, because she wanted to hide her fear of the farmyard and the fact she hadn't done what Lois had told her; and once she'd told the lie she felt she had little option but to go on with it.

As for the whole hike debacle, the people really at fault were Miss Redmond and Miss Leslie, the guide commissioner. It's not the only time Miss Keith nails it - as Karen reports, her view as 'it was the school's fault because there was insufficient supervision'. 'The rules say only three guides' per hike probably to avoid exactly the type of scenario that occurred. Miss Redmond tells Lois she should have found something to occupy the twins to stop them misbehaving - Redmond says this as an experienced teacher, but Lois wasn't even an experienced Patrol Leader. The twins are scapegoated by Redmond, and Marie is collateral damage.

Can you tell I love the whole hike story, it's so brilliantly nuanced!

Marie died! God id completely forgotten - I’m even worse than the Marlows. That’s a bit too convenient isn’t it. I guess she was quite a painful character to write about. It would have been more interesting to bring her back as a bully to others maybe.

I totally get that Nicola didn’t know about her dead uncles. This is where my specialist knowledge as the youngest by a long way of a biggish family (cousins in my case rather than all siblings) comes in. There is a lot of information that gets shared with older children but doesn’t get discussed again when the younger ones are growing up. What I didn’t know about my own family would fill several books. I was also completely incurious about most of it, much like Lawrie. I’ve read a blog today about End of Term with everyone very shocked at Lawrie’s total ignorance of basic religious knowledge. All I can say is that I can relate - and I was a church choir member, a reader and supposedly academic. It would never have occurred to me that Jesus was Jewish, though I don’t think I would have been as crass as Lawrie in how I received the clarification. The antisemitism endemic to British mainstream culture sometimes translates into just a big gap of ‘things that aren’t mentioned’.

Yes the change in money is what threw me the most. It suddenly felt so unromantic that things were suddenly 20p rather than shillings and pence. I didn't realise until this thread that AF just matched them to the time she wrote them. I just assumed the timeline included decimalisation; I don't think I even registered the other anomalies.

I've read Patrick and Peter fanfic in the dim and distant past! I can't remember where - AO3 perhaps? There was quite a lot of fic about all of them as adults.

I enjoyed the essay posted above about Ann who I think is treated appallingly by the rest of the family. I find Nick irritating because she's so obviously the one we're supposed to admire. It made me much more sympathetic to flawed Ginty and Lawrie who always seemed more relatable.

Have a look on Abe Books. You can usually find secondhand paperbacks. I thoroughly recommend reading them all, even the rather mad The Thuggery Affair, which has a plot that involves pigeons drug smuggling and Patrick joyriding in a stolen car with a Teddy boy who speaks impenetrable slang.

Trennels used to do vast amounts of fan fic prompts so there was at one point a huge amount of it. I assume some of it has found its way to AO3. Some of it comical — crossovers between Kingscote and the Chalet School, Lawrie in Richard Curtis films. Some rather glum, like a cautious romance between Rowan and Jan Scott, years on. Lots of yearning across desks in small town solicitors’ offices.

@TarquinGyrfalcon great name! The thing that fascinates me about The Thursday Kidnapping is that the two sets of parents bugger off - the Daddies to their Very Important secret job; the Mummies to go shopping in the West End- leaving an 8 year old, a 9 year old and a baby in the charge of a 12 year old and a 13 year old. All day! And when disaster, including a serious road accident, occurs, does anyone call social services? Suggest that the parents are grossly irresponsible? Obviously not . A nice middle class Hampstead family!

https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Antonia+Forest%22

link to two of the books.

Mind you, I'm not sure any of the Marlow holiday books stand up to responsible parenting scrutiny, even by the standards of period children's books where adults have to be hapless, absent or actively evil in order for plots to happen.

In Falconer's Lure, Patrick has been badly injured enough to be off school for months after a fall from steep cliffs, whereupon he promptly takes Peter and Nicola up the same cliffs after young birds of prey, Peter gets stuck and nearly falls, and they have to get the coastguard to rescue them. The first their parents know of it is when it's in the local paper. Then Peter shoots and kills Patrick's hawk killing rabbits, and could probably have shot Nicola or Patrick too.

In Peter's Room, Patrick puts an old gun to his head and is about to pull the trigger without realising it's loaded before Nicola knocks his hand away, meaning it discharges out the window and nearly hits Rowan.

In The Marlows and the Traitor, not only are Peter and Nicola nearly washed out to sea in a dangerous surge on holiday, and Nicola spends all her free time with a much older male stranger she never mentions to her family. they then trespass in an empty house while their mother is away for a weekend, narrowly miss being killed by spies and ex-Nazis, are kidnapped, Ginty and Nicola nearly drown faking Peter's death, Lawrie is badly hurt and hospitalised after jumping off a bus she doesn't have a fare for into traffic, and Peter shoots and kills a man. And their mother knows nothing about any of this.

In The Thuggery Affair, Peter, Patrick and Lawrie get involved with a drug-smuggling, violent local gang, Lawrie narrowly escapes sexual assault, one gang member is stabbed and killed, Peter and Patrick are both threatened and duffed up, and Patrick joyrides with a gang member who is killed when their stolen car crashes, while Patrick is thrown clear.

In Run Away Home, Peter and the supposedly responsible Giles sail across the Channel in a barely seaworthy boat to return a fugitive child to French soil, Giles is knocked unconscious on the way home, Peter can't really handle the boat solo, so navigates for an entire night through marina traffic by luck and torchlight, whereupon the boat breaks up on the shore and they both nearly drown.

And I'm sure there's more I've forgotten.

Peter can't really handle the boat solo, so navigates for an entire night through marina traffic by luck and torchlight, whereupon the boat breaks up on the shore and they both nearly drown.

Very nearly duffers.

Yes obviously times were different and children did have a lot more independence. I think it’s the fact that they are left in charge of a baby that I find especially alarming in Thursday Kidnapping. And they lose him too! Albeit temporarily.

In The Ready Made Family Nick manages to rescue Karen's stepdaughter (and herself) from a serial killing paedophile Just In Time.

I can't think of any other children's book that went there.

Maybe not technically a serial killer - he had killed 'other children' but if it was only two of them he doesn't qualify.

There’s a very long running series on Archive of Our Own where Lawrie is a world-famous actress married to Charles Maynard. https://archiveofourown.org/series/2917098

Indeed!😀

Yes!! I don’t think I grasped the meaning of Rowan’s comment about their being ‘found under the leaves like those other children’ when I read if for the first time. It’s unbelievably dark for what’s ostensibly a children’s novel.

It’s terrifying. And the beginnings of Nicola being uneasy when she realises, after initially thinking ‘Thank heavens, Rose and a responsible grown up!’ that ‘Uncle Gerry’ can’t be Rose’s uncle and doesn’t know her mother is dead — it’s incredibly eerie and well-judged. And the bit where the lights come on in their empty family home…

Lots of the parenting decisions are very questionable.

I love AF as she goes to places other children's authors ignore. She explores all kinds of things like cowardice, the fact characters are nuanced - neither good nor and, loyalty - periods even get a mention in Cricket Term.

Thought I'd revive the name for this thread!

Yes in TTK we see casual adulting at its finest!
I do love Ellen's practical and pragmatic management of her siblings and household chores (before they lose Bart)

Patrick makes a few questionable decisions -he injures himself badly on the cliffs.Takes Peter to the cliffs where he gets stuck. Endangers Nicola on Buster a number of times including at the Boxing Day hunt when he is so wrapped up in Gondalling he doesn't notice her.

There's a great fanfic cross fiction where Rowan meets Roger Walker from Swallows and Amazons https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11281870/1/Roger-and-the-Marlows

Devil by the Sea, by Nina Bawden, went there. It's absolutely chilling.