‘Falconer’s Lure’ by Antonia Forest

'Falconer's Lure' by Antonia ForestI have been working very hard on my new book and felt I deserved a reward, so you know what that means – Antonia Forest read-along time! And really, with the world in its current state of chaos and despair, what better time to immerse oneself in a nice story about English children enjoying their summer holidays on a country estate. That’s pretty much all I know about Falconer’s Lure, except I’ve also read that it’s a pony book, but with falcons instead of ponies. I am totally on board for anything involving posh country estates, although I’m a bit wary about the falconry, being very much against animal cruelty, especially involving birds. Then again, most of my knowledge of falconry comes from reading T. H. White’s biography and he was notoriously bad at doing it, so maybe it’s not as awful as I think.

For those new to this series of books, they feature the Marlow family, which consists of Commander Marlow, Mrs Marlow and eight Marlow offspring: Giles, Karen, Rowan, Ann, Ginty, Peter and identical twins Nicola and Lawrie. In the first book, Autumn Term, the twins had an eventful first term at their new boarding school. In the second, The Marlows and The Traitor, Nicola, Peter and Ginty got caught up in a terrifying adventure on land and at sea after uncovering a naval spy. Whatever will they get up to on their summer holidays? With Antonia Forest, anything is possible.

Chapter One: Jael in the Morning

This is the first Marlow book that’s explicitly stated the year in which it’s set. It takes place in the summer of 1948 at Trennels Old Farm (exact location unspecified), which was requisitioned by the military during the war and recently inherited by Cousin Jon after the death of their Great Uncle Lawrence. The story begins with Nicola fetching the breakfast eggs from the farmer and glorying in the sunlit countryside, when she hears what she thinks is a distressed cat stuck in a tree. Nicola, “who had a tender feeling for all animals except anteaters”, climbs to the rescue and finds herself facing what seems to be an enraged eagle. Actually, it’s a goshawk called Jael, as Nicola is informed by its supercilious owner, Patrick Merrick, whom she recognises as a friend of her brother Peter’s from before the war. Patrick snaps orders at her, calls her a “clot” and “silly” for not knowing everything he does about falconry and is unsympathetic when Jael slices open Nicola’s ungloved thumb. What a lovely boy. I sincerely hope he’s not a future love interest for Nicola. Or any of her sisters. Or her brothers. I think even Giles deserves better.

Anyway, they rescue Jael and walk back to Patrick’s house, exchanging family news. Giles is now a Lieutenant, Karen is off to read Classics at Oxford, Rowan is going into Sixth Form and will probably be Games Captain (what, not Head Girl?), Peter is doing well at Dartmouth, Nicola’s father has been promoted to Captain, and the Marlows’ Hampstead house is finally habitable again after being bombed in the war.

Meanwhile, Patrick’s father has just been elected an MP, so his family has to move to London. I’m not sure why – can’t his father stay in a flat there when Parliament is sitting so his family can remain at their country estate? Patrick also reveals he attends a local day school, which he loathes, but that he hasn’t been at school at all for the last two years:

“Expelled?” [Nicola] asked instantly, for she was always hoping to meet someone to whom this enthralling thing had happened.

But it turns out Patrick was ill. I wonder what made him too sick for school for two years. Polio? TB? They were both deadly diseases in the 1940s.

Nicola is impressed with Patrick’s beautiful hunting birds (even though the poor things are TIED UP and UNABLE TO FLY). Apart from Jael, there’s Regina, an imperious peregrine falcon, and The Sprog, a sweet little jack merlin. Patrick asks if Nicola will help him look after the hawks. They really belong to Jon, but Jon’s busy being a test pilot for experimental planes at the local airfield. Naturally, Nicola says yes. Then she goes back to Trennels to breakfast, Patrick refusing to come in and say hello to the family (“I don’t think I could meet eight practically strange people on an empty stomach”). That’s okay, Patrick, they probably wouldn’t enjoy meeting you, either.

Chapter Two: Grand Stoop

Back at Trennels, Mrs Herbert, the housekeeper, is loudly unimpressed with Patrick’s “nasty great birds”, because one of the hawks killed her old cat and she has quite reasonable fears for the wellbeing of young Fluff. Nicola tends to her wounded thumb and goes in to breakfast, where much is revealed about the Marlows.

Firstly, the hawks were really Great Uncle Lawrence’s and Jon inherited them reluctantly. Jon also says the RAF used hawks to kill pigeons near airfields during the war. Really? I happen to know a bit about pigeons in WWII and there was actually an official campaign to shoot birds of prey to stop them killing carrier pigeons, which were a vital part of military communications. That was mostly on the east coast of England, though, and who knows where Trennels is. Jon throws about a lot of hawking jargon, which interests Nicola and Karen, then they get onto the subject of Patrick. Nicola reports Patrick is “nicer than he was” (he must have been appalling before) and Jon tells them Patrick was badly injured and nearly killed when he fell off a cliff while trying to steal baby hawks from a nest. No wonder Patrick’s mother doesn’t like his hawks.

It also turns out Captain Marlow knows quite a bit about hawks, too (so Jon is his cousin, not Mrs Marlow’s) but he was never allowed to go near them because he was so “rough and rude”. Ginty is horrified to hear that hawks are used to hunt not just rabbits and partridges (that is, animals that you can eat) but also larks and blackbirds for entertainment. Jon says it’s all great fun, like “watching hounds at work with a fox” and that he thinks objections to blood-sports are “a bit exaggerated”. Well, I’m with Ginty on this issue. She storms off, but Mrs Marlow explains it’s only because she’s “been worked up and weepy since Easter”, after what Jon thinks was the children “getting themselves shipwrecked and having to spend the week-end in a lighthouse”. Captain Marlow is coldly unsympathetic and says “it’s time she got over it”.

Well, actually she wasn’t just shipwrecked. She was KIDNAPPED by a SOCIOPATHIC TRAITOR and DRUGGED and forced to wade through a tunnel (even though she’s been terrified of enclosed spaces ever since she was BURIED ALIVE UNDER A BOMBED HOUSE IN THE BLITZ) and then she nearly DROWNED and was on the verge of being MURDERED BY NAZI SPIES and afterwards was FORBIDDEN TO TALK ABOUT HER EXPERIENCES so if anyone has the right to be a bit shaken, it’s Ginty.

The family think Ginty’s lack of moral fibre is due to her new school friend Unity Logan, whom I kept picturing as Unity Mitford. Unity is an intense child who goes around adoring Ginty, telling Rowan, “I’d risk more than an order mark for a friend like Ginnie. I think she’s the most beautiful thing the gods ever made.” As if that isn’t bad enough, Nicola notes that Unity writes poetry. About Beauty. And also writes long holiday letters to Ginty.

Lawrie tries to draw attention back to herself by reminding them all she has a limp from when she was run over by a car. She is firmly squashed by her father, who says it’s boring to talk about illness. Then he humiliates Ann, who is just trying to make sure Nicola’s wounded thumb is properly bandaged. Then he tries to berate Peter for not addressing Cousin Jon with the proper formality, but fortunately Peter is already out of earshot. And Mrs Marlow hurries to placate her husband. My already low opinion of Captain Marlow has descended to uncharted depths. Maybe he and Patrick could go off and live together in some other, non-Marlow, book, so I don’t have to read about them anymore.

But I think my favourite bits of these books are the keen psychological observations. For example, here’s Peter when Nicola explains that Patrick only wants her to visit the hawks:

“Oh, all right,” said Peter carelessly. He felt such an odd mixture of feelings – hurt astonishment that Patrick should have warned him off, jealousy because Nicola was admitted to what was evidently privileged ground, and fury with himself for being either hurt or jealous – that the only thing to do was to spin round and dash after Cousin Jon, shouting “Wait for me, man! I’m coming!”

Peter goes off with Jon to the airfield while Nicola and Patrick walk to the Crowlands and try, unsuccessfully, to get The Sprog to pounce on a lure. There are some lovely descriptions of the countryside and of Jon’s plane “plunging down the sky”, the vapour trails “sketched across the blue like lines drawn by a slate pencil”. Then comes a moment when “the landscape seemed to quiver”, “as if the air went solid” and it appears someone has lit a bonfire on the horizon, although they don’t hear anything. And, because I’ve read to the end of the chapter and I know what’s coming, I’ll just add that Nicola then passes on the message that Jon will come to see the hawks soon and Patrick says, “Tomorrow, I expect. He’ll be dead to the world tonight.” Oh, no…

Anyway, Patrick and Nicola walk back to his house, having a bonding moment over their respective obsessions (medieval nobility for Patrick, the Navy for Nicola) and then tend to the hawks. But before Patrick can accompany Nicola to Trennels for supper, he’s stopped in a very awkward manner by his housekeeper. And then on the way back Nicola meets Peter, who looks and sounds very odd:

“The sun came down in slanting lines through the trees, and made a fishnet of light on the bed of the stream. It was doing that when Nicola and Peter first met. It was still doing so, five minutes later. But by then Peter had managed to tell her that Cousin Jon had been killed when the plane crashed, and that made everything look quite different.”

Oh, no! Poor Jon. Poor Peter, who had to watch his cousin being killed. And what’s going to happen to Trennels now? Jon doesn’t seem to have any children. Do the Marlows inherit Trennels or is there some other relative around?

Next, Chapter Three: “No One Ever Tells Us Anything”

You might also be interested in reading:

‘Falconer’s Lure’, Part Two
‘Falconer’s Lure’, Part Three
‘Falconer’s Lure’, Part Four
‘Falconer’s Lure’, Part Five
‘Falconer’s Lure’, Part Six
‘Falconer’s Lure’, Part Seven
‘Falconer’s Lure’, Part Eight

28 thoughts on “‘Falconer’s Lure’ by Antonia Forest”

  1. I’m laughing out loud at your reaction to Patrick. I first met him in End Of Term in which he’s at his relative best, not reading FL till years later. Reaction to Patrick among readers seems to vary from absolute love to absolute loathing. As a 12/13 year old I liked everyone that Nicola liked so I liked him, but as an adult reader I’d like to wring his neck! The interesting thing is that all the characters in the series like him, with the possible exception of his own mother.

  2. Yay! Falconer’s Lure! A treat indeed 🙂

    That final paragraph of chapter 2 is one of my favourite passages in all literature.

    Yes, this is Patrick at his absolute worst… or is it? He has some choice moments later on, too. I’m afraid I find Patrick only intermittently likeable, his yellow-eyed charms were lost on me.

    And poor Ginty. I only got hold of Marlows & the Traitor about 30 years after Falconer’s Lure, so I probably thought she was making a fuss about nothing, too. But now… jeepers, cut her some slack, Captain Marlow.

    1. Captain Marlow is TERRIBLE. He isn’t even there to do any parenting most of the time, but when he is at home he spends all his time being horrible to his children. No wonder Peter’s such an emotionally-repressed mess.

    1. Oh, Dorset, really? Well, they definitely wouldn’t have been killing pigeons there in the war! Kingscote seems to be somewhere on the south coast, so maybe the Marlow parents chose that school because it was close to their family at Trennels. Or maybe Mrs Marlow went there herself.

  3. Perhaps AF was confused by later commercial airfields, where hawks were (and still are) tethered or flown to deter wild pigeons and other birds?
    However, I knew someone who kept messenger pigeons during WW2, and they were kept on his own property, nowhere near any airfield. (He still used the pigeon houses as a garden shed, many years after the war).

    1. Thanks for the link to that article, Sue – it was very interesting. It does seem that the WWII scheme for taking down enemy carrier pigeons with hawks wasn’t very successful.

      Yes, I was wondering about Patrick and ASD, because his social skills and emotional maturity seem so limited for a fifteen-year-old, even one who’s missed a few years of school through illness.

      1. The truth about the hawks probably lies “somewhere in between”. I don’t understand why carrier pigeons would be anywhere near an airfield, whereas wild birds certainly would be. In modern times, pictures of hawks at Heathrow show them tethered or on a glove. I’m sure that they aren’t left to their own devices. Perhaps it was wild hawks that were being shot during WW2 , on the carrier pigeons’ flight-paths

        1. Yes, it was wild birds of prey being shot in the war, although there were carrier pigeons kept at airfields, too. The RAF pilots would put the pigeons on their planes before flying over enemy territory, so that if the plane crashed, they could send the pigeons back with their location. Quite a few pilots were rescued due to pigeon messages. Of course, then the Germans tried to use their hawks to kill the British pigeons …

      2. I was just watching a video about teenage girls and ASD
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfOHnt4PMFo
        and Lawrie really does seems to hit a lot of the points – huge emotional intensity, not thinking anyone other than herself has emotions, leaving Nicola to take the lead in high stress personal encounters (as if she doesn’t know what to do), liking acting and has skills with accents/impersonations, has an in depth knowledge of the theatre scene (comparable to Nicola’s Nelson fixation) and can say stuff that is totally inappropriate and not recognise that it’s inappropriate.

        However, I think she was just written to be immature with emotional intensities that lend themselves to acting. But it’s quite interesting doing the comparison.

    2. He is swaggering about entering diving comps and equestrian events about which he is very confident..No genuinely shy person would thrust themselves in to the limelight in this manner. His only redeeming trait is the championing of Richard III.

  4. Oh, and i don’t think Captian Mastold the fulltruth about Foley and the kidnapping, though I may be wrong.I will check my copy of MATT later.

    1. I’m not sure the book explicitly says Captain Marlow was told about the whole spy kidnapping thing – but surely he’d find out, when he’s friends with that naval intelligence officer who’s in charge of everything (forget his name). I can’t imagine he’d accept that implausible story about drug smugglers that they told poor Mrs Marlow.

  5. I don’t like Patrick or Captain Marlow either, and I think you sum up very well the reasons they are so unappealing. I think Forest generally gave her female characters a very deferential attitude to both (and to the repellent Giles, who thankfully is absent from this book) and that’s one of the most irritating things about them – that everyone else somehow accepts their highhandedness. I don’t think the children should necessarily have decided where the family lived, but surely Mrs M’s views should have had more weight? In fact, I find it interesting – hope this isn’t a spoiler – that Captain M rather vanishes in later books: I think Forest must have realised, even if subconsciously, that things would be more interesting without an authoritarian papa telling everyone what to do.

    FL is not my favourite precisely because it seems such a conventional/hierarchical portrait of family life: contrast to Kingscote where everyone is much more insubordinate towards authority.

    1. Thanks for commenting, Emma. I suppose Antonia Forest could have been writing about life as it really was in the 1940s, when women and children mostly were subordinate to men? But yes, it’s certainly annoying! I am pleased to hear Captain M disappears later!

      1. I suppose Antonia Forest could have been writing about life as it really was in the 1940s, when women and children mostly were subordinate to men?

        Yes, that’s possibly true, and one reason I prefer the middle books in the series (because of the peculiar Marlow time line, each book has the background of when it was written, which means that although only supposedly a few months older A LOT changes – they are no longer saying “Mother” and “Father” for one thing. And Mrs Marlow actually develops a character which is quite spiky instead of just being archetypal devoted wife-and-mother). But the updating of social attitudes doesn’t really seem to apply when it comes to Patrick…

        1. In the Kingscote filler ‘Spring Term’ by Sally Hayward they are referencing Simon le Bon a man nowhere yet conceived when the Marlow twins were swanning about form upper form IV a

          1. You never know, perhaps Simon Le Bon is immortal. Perhaps he has always existed and always will exist. He certainly doesn’t seem to have aged much since the eighties.

  6. English children on a country estate is exactly what I’m in the mood for at the moment. I do wish these books were available digitally because: 1) my vision is getting so wonky that I struggle with book print, and 2) I have NO patience. When I see an interesting book I want it NOW.

    1. These books really are wonderful, Sonia, but unfortunately very difficult to get hold of! (Also, the print versions I bought have tiny print.) Girls Gone By are gradually re-printing all of them, but I don’t know if they’ve considered digital publishing. It shouldn’t be too difficult for them to do ebook versions if they already have the print files.

      1. I did find a copy of Autumn Term–with smallish print, alas–but blast if I didn’t leave it at home. (We are halfway across the country while my husband visits at another law school.) Nevertheless, that is the starting point for these characters, yes?

        1. Yes, Autumn Term is the first Marlow book and my favourite so far. Nicola, the main protagonist, is twelve in that one. Then The Marlows and the Traitor is set a few months later, and then Falconer’s Lure a few months after that. Apparently the time line gets a bit fuzzy as the series progresses!
          Hope you’re having a good summer break and aren’t affected by the terrible weather in Texas. It sounds as though the winds and flooding are causing havoc there.

  7. Don’t forget Patrick is panicking about losing Jael when we first meet him – 15 year old boys do tend to lose their social graces under stress.
    And Captain Marlow disciplines his daughter by reciting Jabberwocky at her – he can’t be all bad.

    1. Yes, that’s true about Patrick in that first scene – except he doesn’t show any social graces later, either!

      Actually, the Jabberwocky bit was the only time Captain Marlow seemed likeable and it was SO out-of-character for him that I wondered if the author had thrown in a bit of whimsy just to humanise him. I think my anti-Captain-Marlow bias is firmly entrenched now…

      1. Yes, you have taken against them a bit. I only read this book long after some of the others. Maybe I just liked who Nicola liked.

  8. “I sincerely hope he’s not a future love interest for Nicola. Or any of her sisters. Or her brothers. I think even Giles deserves better.”

    Wait and see!

    I agree with those saying read the books before the fanfic, but when you get to the fanfic (some of which is magnificent) the role of Patrick as love interest to everyone (other than Karen and Mrs Marlow is explored.)

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