Chapter Six: “All the Birds of the Air…”
SPROG IS DEAD HOW COULD YOU DO THAT ANTONIA FOREST POOR LITTLE SPROG DYING ALONE IN THE COLD POOR NICOLA THIS IS SO UNFAIR.
Of course, Nicola doesn’t allow herself to cry, “even though when animals died it was always misery past bearing; one would always much rather it were one of the family.”
She is slightly comforted by the thought of Emily Brontë mourning her dead cat. This doesn’t seem very plausible to me, given Nicola’s previous opinion of the Brontës, but I’m not going to begrudge poor Nicola any comfort.
I suppose one good thing is that now she can take Daks back to school as her pet, not Lawrie’s, which will work out better for Esther. I have to say, Daks is having a much better holiday than if he’d been allowed to stay in Esther’s flat. He has Tessa and Bucket as playmates, Peter to fuss over him, and lots of delicious farm smells to wallow in. Poodle heaven.
Chapter Seven: Dispatches to Angora: II
More Gondalling. The Guards realise that Alcona’s map is wrong, they discover their sealed dispatches are their death warrants, and Lawrie/Jason reveals that Alcona forced young Jason to watch his loyal rescuers being tortured to death. Patrick admiringly says to Lawrie, “I couldn’t have done Alcona’s particular brand of nastiness better myself.”
Then there’s an ambush in the “quicksnow” and the Guards fight bravely, get wounded and kill lots of enemies. Unfortunately, Rupert/Patrick is captured by evil Navarre/Peter. Threatened with torture, Rupert/Patrick says he’ll tell “anything you want to know” and quickly spills all his country’s military secrets and agrees to kill Jason. The Marlows are outraged by this (“You can’t just tell like that!”) but Patrick:
“found it imperative to explore, under cover of Rupert, the twilights of cowardice and betrayal: partly, he wanted to know how it felt, partly, Rupert was undoubtedly that sort of person.”
Does Patrick want to explore cowardice because it’s so unfamiliar to him? He seems brave when it comes to physical feats – he doesn’t, for example, avoid cliffs, even after his near-fatal accident, and he’s a fearless horse rider. He does avoid social situations – but he’s so supercilious and disdainful of others that it seems strange he’d be afraid of doing the wrong thing and having people laugh at him or dislike him (which is the case for most people with social anxiety). This book is set in the Cold War and Patrick has an uncle in the Foreign Office, so perhaps he’s considering spies and traitors and wondering whether he himself might be capable of treachery?
Ginty goes along with this plot because it has more dramatic potential for her Crispian/Rupert romance, but she considers:
“Since she was quite often frightened herself, she thought fearlessness, which she confused with courage, the most valuable and enviable quality in the world.”
This is a good point to make. Nicola is mostly fearless, but also brave – she does what she believes is right, even when it scares her. Peter is often fearful and forces himself to be brave, although because he’s under such pressure to Be A Marlow Man, it’s often reckless foolishness, not bravery. Lawrie is neither fearless nor brave, but doesn’t really care about looking cowardly – she just stores it all up as acting fuel.
Nicola, by the way, says Rupert’s decision to tell all before the torturing starts is “jolly sensible”, but I think that’s only because she’s bored by all the Gondalling. She’d be horrified if, say, she discovered Nelson had ever behaved in such a cowardly manner.
On the subject of Nelson, I forgot to note earlier that when Peter discovered the old farm journals, there’s a casual mention of how the original Trennels farmhouse had “been built by a Marlow called Joshua who’d made his pile in the slave trade”. None of the Marlows seems to think there’s anything bothersome about this. And I was just reading about Nelson being friends with Caribbean planters and slave owners and how Nelson fought against William Wilberforce and the abolition movement. Is Nicola aware of this? Would she care? Given the children’s offhand use of racist slurs, I’d have to assume she’d be perfectly fine with Nelson’s opinions on slavery and Empire.
Chapter Eight: Dead of Night
This is nice chapter with no Gondalling whatsoever. Nicola wakes up in the middle of the night, convinced a burglar is prowling around downstairs. She bravely goes downstairs in her dressing-gown and grabs a poker (“Better not wake anyone until she was sure, because though she was sure, she’d look an awful fool” if it didn’t turn out to be a burglar). And it’s not a burglar – it’s Rowan with two newborn lambs nearly dead from cold. While they’re waiting for the lambs to revive, they have a good chat about Nicola’s life plans. Rowan suggests Nicola could train to be a vet (“you like animals and you’re not nervous of them and you handle them well”) and then she could come back to Trennels to look after their animals.
Nicola is not very enthusiastic about the living at Trennels bit and gets Rowan to admit that her new life as a farmer is pretty dull. Nicola says she sees that it might help if Nicola came back to keep Rowan company, but Rowan knocks that idea on the head at once:
“In twenty years we’d be Two Terrible Tweedy Types known far and wide as The Queer Miss Marlows.”
Yes, they would. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Antonia Forest must have been reading a lot of Mary Renault.
What Nicola really wants to do is:
“…joining the Wrens for a bit if I could be sure I’d be posted to Malta or Gib or somewhere sensible. And then I’d like to work my way around the world doing all sorts of different jobs, like people do. And if I could find anywhere no one had been yet I’d like to go there and be the first person, ever.”
That all sounds perfectly reasonable to me, apart from the explorer bit, and Rowan agrees, as long as Nicola doesn’t mind being poor, which she doesn’t.
Then, hooray, the lambs come back to life (I don’t want any more animals dying in this book, thanks very much) and Rowan takes them back to their mother and Nicola tidies up the kitchen and falls asleep there.
Next, Chapter Nine: The Twelfth Day of Christmas
Patrick probably has the most experience of pain out of all of them, what with the cliff fall and the long recovery. He’s also got his martyr forbear who was hung, drawn and quartered, and from a young age he’s been obsessed with the priest-hole and penal times and martyrdom. He must have been brooding on the idea of torture and how he would stand up to it, long before the Gondal.
Yes, you’re right. I’d forgotten about his obsession with his Catholic ancestors being persecuted. I don’t remember the hung, drawn and quartered detail, though – is that in a later book? There are thousands of Catholic saints with gory martyrdoms, aren’t there, so no wonder he’s spent time pondering how he’d react if he’d lived then and his faith had been tested.
In EOT he tells Nicola he had an ancestor at Tyburn; the description of his death is in the historical book The Players And The Rebels.
|Player’s Boy is the one with the Tyburn episode
Sprog — sob. I hate it when Sprog dies. But it’s such a beautifully written scene.
The slave trade is a terrible throwaway remark. But I agree, I don’t think the Marlows would agonise over it particularly. They’d probably be more upset if an ancestor was involved in live sheep exports.
The chapter where Rowan and Nicola have a midnight chat over the lambs is one of my faves. Rowan seems to be sixteen going on about thirty! I can’t imagine my sixteen year old offering such wise advice!
As an anxious teen, the distinctions between courage and fearlessness gave me much food for thought. It’s a central theme in Forest, isn’t it, all the different varieties of fear and bravery. Lawrie is always mocked for her wussiness, but in some ways she seems mentally healthier than say, Peter, who is always repressing it and putting himself and others in danger as a consequence.
I know what you mean about Rowan! Apart from doing all the farming, she seems to be doing a much better job of parenting Nicola than Mrs Marlow.