Category: 1950s and 1960s

Chapter Three: A Gentleman of the Fancy

As they walk back to Patrick’s house, Peter notices they’re being trailed by Jukie. “Don’t look now,” he tells Lawrie, “who immediately did, in all directions”. Oh, Lawrie. But they get back safely and Patrick fusses around with Regina. Peter sensibly points out that Regina was released for a reason, but Patrick says it’s all sorted now – he’ll just write to the British Falconry Society and find a full-time falconer to keep her during term-time in London. Yet somehow Patrick couldn’t have done this six months ago. Antonia Forest is just making this up as she goes along, isn’t she?

Patrick also realises he needs Regina’s bells, which he gave to Nicola, but Lawrie is scandalised by the idea that anyone should take them from Nicola’s special private box without Nicola’s permission:

“Patrick saw he was up against one of those family taboos which, as an only child, struck him as both infantile and incomprehensible.”

But I’m with Lawrie. If you come from a family with eight siblings, the small bits of privacy you possess have to be respected by everyone. Patrick has never had to share anything, so he doesn’t understand this. But Peter, “who should have known better”, says he’ll take the bells from Nicola’s box and take the blame. However, Peter has something more important on his mind. He asks to see the dead pigeon Regina is still gnawing on, looks at the ring on its leg, is about to say something … when Jukie struts in.

(Before I go on with the plot, I have to say I love the vivid little bits of descriptions, such as Bucket “comfortably spatchcocked under the table”! Can’t you see that image exactly in your mind?)

Anyway, Jukie demands to see the dead pigeon, Peter tosses it at him, Jukie fumbles and misses, and there’s a bit of macho posturing between the three boys while Lawrie is ignored, to her resentment. Jukie retrieves the pigeon’s leg ring and claims it’s from Red Rocket, a champion flyer, so Patrick’s “daddy-o” will have to pay lots of compensation. This is disputed by Peter, who says the pigeon was a blue chequer, and Patrick, also sceptical, makes sure he reminds Jukie that it’s Miss Culver’s pigeon, not Jukie’s. Jukie walks off, not quite as comfortably as he entered, and Peter drops his bombshell. There was another dead pigeon which he scooped up in his mackintosh and “this one’s the one with the message”!

Dramatic chapter end there. Also, I assume the title of this chapter is making fun of the notion that a boy like Jukie could ever be a gentleman. There’s a bit where Lawrie is wondering about his accent and realising he’s “true north country” and “sham Yankee” with a bit of imitating Miss Culver.

Chapter Four: “…Poor Airy Post”

The poor dead pigeon is wearing a little leather harness attached to a capsule. They discuss whether they should take it straight to the police or MI5 and Patrick is surprised that “spies should be the very first thing you think of” and even more surprised when he sees the meaningful looks the Marlows exchange. Interesting. Because only a couple of months ago, Peter had apparently repressed all memory of the time he was kidnapped by a spy. Patrick also points out that it’s extremely unlikely Maudie Culver is passing information to the Communists because she’s such a “blot-blue Tory” and what information would she have anyway?

Unfortunately, while they’re debating this, Jukie sneaks back in. (Bucket is too busy being a spatchcock to be much of a guard dog.) Jukie tries to scam them into paying him, not Miss Culver. He’ll swap the leg rings for an ‘inferior’ pigeon in the loft, Patrick’s daddy-o won’t have to pay hundreds of pounds compensation and Patrick can give Jukie some money in return. This doesn’t work because firstly, Patrick has no motivation to lie to his father (and Patrick doesn’t even have to say out loud that a hundred pounds is nothing to a rich MP). Secondly, Peter is unexpectedly knowledgeable about pigeons and explains you can’t swap pigeon rings on grown birds.

But then Jukie sees the pigeon with the harness:

“Plainly, he knew only too well what it was: plainly also, this was an attempt to get bird and harness into his hands: only, if he were to preserve the fiction that it wasn’t a Culver bird, he couldn’t be too insistent.”

As Patrick refuses to hand the pigeon over, Jukie is forced to retreat without it, but he leaves with the threat that if they go to the police, his thugs will come round and dig Regina’s eyes out. Peter and Lawrie are suitably intimidated but “Patrick’s face could have been used as a model for a mask labelled murder”. Jukie gives Patrick a look of “surprised respect” and scoots off.

Now, I know Patrick’s confidence comes from his class and wealth, but I’m on Patrick’s side here. Anyone who threatens to mutilate an animal deserves murderous looks and more.

Patrick obviously can’t leave Regina in the hawk-house so he takes her into the house and hides her in a very cool secret room that was used to hide priests in the “penal times”. Peter is a bit annoyed that Patrick had always denied any “Secret of the Moated Pile”, but Patrick explains that when they were young, he really did believe that Catholics were under siege and that Protestant Marlows couldn’t be trusted. Even though a priest was turning up at their house every Sunday to say Mass:

“Every Sunday I thought this would be the day for the brutal soldiery to burst in the front door.”

Honestly, where did he get this from? I can’t imagine his father would have encouraged this sort of thinking. Maybe Mrs Merrick? She doesn’t seem super-Catholic, though.

The children then decide to open the pigeon’s capsule, even though Patrick is sure it’ll just say something like “Dear Jukie Meet Me At The Palais 7:30 Saturday Your Ever-Loving Chick Sandra.” This leads to an exchange about their own love lives.

Patrick asks Peter, “And what do you make do with? A half-hitch in every port?”

WHAT does this mean? The Navy’s famous for male homosexuality, but I’m not sure that fits here and surely they wouldn’t talk about that in front of Lawrie? Peter denies he has any social life and says Patrick, at day school in London, has “more chances than the rest of us … Surely you date the chicks?”

Lawrie and Peter are teasing him, thinking this is unlikely. Why? He’s fifteen (or sixteen now?) and supposed to be good-looking, although admittedly, his social skills aren’t very good. I don’t know what dating norms were for public school boys in London then. Do we know which school he attends? I am imagining Westminster, but maybe he goes to a Catholic school. Anyway, Patrick blushes, thinking of Ginty, then flippantly says, “A different chick every night of the week, actually” and changes the subject to the capsule.

Which turns out to contain a mysterious white powder! It’s bicarb of soda, which the pigeons carry about in case they have a sudden stomach upset! (Okay, that bit made me laugh out loud.) No, maybe it’s arsenic or strychnine or a secret Kremlin explosive or … or cocaine! Which Lawrie actually tastes, because she’s an idiot. Peter is reluctant to go to the police because they “mustn’t sneak”, but Patrick says drug-smuggling is “worse than most murders”:

“Really, it is a kind of physical blackmail, isn’t it? You chat people into taking the stuff, you make them so dependent on it they have the heebie jeebies if they can’t get it and then you make them pay the earth to keep getting it.”

I think he’s got most of his information from reading Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie. Then he has another revelation – Jukie’s name doesn’t come from “jukebox”, as they’d thought, but “junkie”. As Patrick solemnly explains to the others, “Junkie – in their language – means drug addict.” Okay, I laughed out loud at that bit, too. So far most of the slang has been barely recognisable to me, but the one word that I do know – because it’s now part of everyday language – is the word that Patrick and Antonia Forest carefully explain to us.

By the way, Patrick understands Ted-speak because he regularly visits a London coffee-bar which is always “crammed with the kiddoes and the chicks yapping away and being with it like mad.” The image of Patrick trying to look like a cool cat in a café is also pretty funny to me.

Anyway, they decide to take the capsule to their local policeman, Tom Catchpole, in order to be nice to him and also because his young wife is “dishy” and a “smasher”. Way to go with the sexual objectification of women, Peter and Patrick.

Next: A Brush with the Enemy

This is the sixth book in Antonia Forest’s series about the Marlow family. I’ve really enjoyed most of them so far, especially the school books, but all I know about this one is that it involves drug-smuggling pigeons, thugs who speak incomprehensible slang and no Nicola. It sounds like some bizarre children’s version of A Clockwork Orange and the cover is even worse than that of Peter’s Room. In other words, I have very low expectations for this book, but it could be an interesting failure. We shall see.

Chapter One: “There’s a Hole in your Boatie”

This chapter begins with a half-page sentence to rival Henry James – eight commas, two semi-colons, one colon, five em-dashes, one set of parenthesised comments, and by my count, eighteen clauses. Antonia Forest seems to be declaring up front that if a child reader can’t cope with an enormously complicated info-dump of a sentence on the first page, that reader might as well give up now. I think it’s meant to show Lawrie’s tangled thought processes, but this could have been demonstrated just as effectively by adding about ten full-stops.

Anyway, we learn that it’s half-term (so, February? March?) and Lawrie, Peter and Patrick are trying out the canoe that the boys built at Christmas after all the Gondalling. Nicola is staying with Miranda in London and Ginty is visiting her grandmother in Paris. Lawrie is sulking about being abandoned by her twin, although when Nicola quite reasonably points out that she wouldn’t object if Lawrie had gone off with Tim, Lawrie says, “But that’s diff’rent.”

Lawrie is such a brat, but I can’t help laughing at her melodramatics. A couple of pages into the chapter, she’s weeping to herself as she imagines being the heroine of BOATING TRAGEDY IN HOGGART’S LOCK (“Mrs Marlow, mother of eight, said with tears in her eyes: “I am prostrated with grief. Lawrie was my favourite child…”).

Lawrie’s fantasy isn’t so far-fetched, because the canoe is rapidly filling with water, nearly crashes into a hidden tree root and ends up sinking when they reach the sea. They are also hours too late to see the ducks fly overhead and Peter is annoyed because he wanted to shoot some fowl. (I can’t believe no one has confiscated his rifle yet! He killed Jael with that rifle! Patrick is being a lot more forgiving than I would have been.) Peter is also doing his very irritating regional dialect thing. At least he refrains from shooting one of a pair of swans. (Isn’t shooting swans illegal in England because they belong to the Queen? Or is that only on the Thames?) The boys drag the canoe out of the mud and leave it on the promontory, then they all start squelching their way home.

Oh, the other thing is that Patrick reveals he’s home alone, with his parents still in London. He only made a fuss about coming to the country because he thought his sort-of-girlfriend Ginty would be at Trennels. Because they clearly don’t write to one another or phone or communicate in any effective way. So I guess their romance hasn’t progressed much since Christmas.

Chapter Two: “Two Pigeons Flying High”

As they walk home, they encounter A Thuggery of Teds, seven juvenile delinquents led by a boy called Jukie. For some reason, the Thuggery are employed by Miss Culver, a tweedy, church-going local woman, to look after her prize pigeons. Neither Patrick nor his parents can stand Miss Culver. It’s unusual for tolerant Mr Merrick to take a dislike to anyone, but

“…he says she stands four-square and looks him straight in the eye and talks to him man-to-man and it frightens him to death. And ma says she’s a natural-born bully.”

Miss Culver also had the nerve to tell poor dead Cousin Jon (before he died, obviously) that he should get rid of his hawks, because they preyed on her pigeons. Plus, her pigeons are “horrible little freaks” who’ve been overbred with “so much wattle on their bills they can’t see to fly”. But before the children can discuss this further, a flock of pigeons flies overhead, Peter tries to shoot one and Patrick suddenly intervenes because he realises there’s also a falcon in the air. And it’s Regina! The falcon he was forced to release six months ago because he couldn’t take her to London with him! And dear old Bucket recognises her, “his tail fluttering in ecstatic welcome”. Awww!

Unfortunately, Miss Culver turns up and tries to shoot Regina because the falcon has just killed and started eating one of the Culver pigeons. Patrick stands in her way and Peter raises his own gun, with “the situation … rapidly becoming stark, staring bonkers”. Fortunately, Miss Culver realises she’s pointing her gun at the only son of the local MP:

“It would have been one thing apparently, thought Patrick hilariously, for Gunslinger Culver to pepper a peasant but quite another to murder a Merrick…”

She calms down a little, gives him a warning about keeping his hawks away from her birds, and is about to walk off when Peter characteristically puts his foot in it. She explodes with rage:

“He was incredulous; he was fascinated; the hope grew that perhaps she would end her – was tirade the word? – by flinging down her glove and challenging him to a duel.”

Lawrie thinks it’s most “funny-peculiar” for a grown-up to behave like this when grown-ups are supposed to stop fights, not start them. Although I’m not sure how respectable Miss Culver can really be when she employs the Thuggery? I think we’re meant to be suspicious of her from the start, based on her “grotesque” physical appearance. Mind you, in previous books, Antonia Forest has heartily disapproved of women who wear fashionable clothes and make-up, so female characters can’t really win in this world, whatever they do.

Anyway, it’s nice that Regina’s back. She flies onto Patrick’s fist and they head for home, Patrick’s eyes “blazing with triumph and pleasure”.

You might also be interested in reading:

The Thuggery Affair, Part Two
The Thuggery Affair, Part Three
The Thuggery Affair, Part Four
The Thuggery Affair, Part Five
The Thuggery Affair, Part Six
The Thuggery Affair, Part Seven

‘Autumn Term’ by Antonia Forest
‘The Marlows and the Traitor’ by Antonia Forest
‘Falconer’s Lure’ by Antonia Forest
‘End of Term’ by Antonia Forest
‘Peter’s Room’ by Antonia Forest

Chapter Eleven: The Dispatch is Delivered

One last bit of Gondalling, in which they finally arrive in Angora. Again, the plot doesn’t make much sense. Jason goes straight to the King because “the matter is of deepest urgency”, but when they meet, Jason doesn’t say a word about the evil Regent’s plots. Instead, he has a nice meal, then when he leaves, Rupert hands over the forged document and claims that he escaped before the Gaaldines could torture him. Rupert goes back to join the other Guards and is horrified to realise they’re about to go and meet the Angoran King, so Rupert’s treachery will soon be revealed. He must quickly kill Jason and escape to Gaaldine, although he wonders whether he’ll be safe there.

This is the point where Ginty says “Let’s get up and act this properly”, suggesting that sometimes their Gondalling was sitting and talking, and sometimes they acted it out.

Rupert/Patrick goes to kill Jason/Lawrie, who is shocked at Rupert’s betrayal but tells Rupert to “shoot me quickly and make your getaway” (in a way that Lawrie would never do). But just as Rupert is about to fire, the others rush in, now aware of Rupert’s treachery. Jason says Rupert must be taken home and tried as a traitor, which means he will burn at the stake. Rupert urges the others to shoot him now, but Malise/Peter says he couldn’t do that, indicating his broken arm from the battle (and Peter actually has a broken collarbone now, so the Gondalling foretold that) and Nicholas/Nicola says Rupert/Patrick deserves to burn (for Rosina, the geese and not caring when she fell off Buster). Rupert announces he will shoot himself and the children break out of Gondalling to discuss this.

Peter says suicide is “too easy” and Nicola wonders how Rupert can do that if he’s Catholic. Ginty wants to save Rupert by sending him into exile “and we could all go into voluntary exile with him”. But Peter thinks Rupert deserves to burn for being a “coward and traitor”. Patrick loses his temper and points out that Malise Marlow, the Civil War ancestor who supported Charles, actually betrayed his own side when the Royalists were losing and showed the Parliamentarians how to get into the Royalist castle. And then Patrick’s Royalist ancestor, Anthony Merrick, was captured and shot.

“There was a moment’s violent silence, loud with old betrayals and antique feuds and ancient enmities. And then Nicola said, ‘Lumme, what a heel!’ and the long dead things went back to their own place. Peter, very pale, said nothing.”

Then Patrick raises an actual pistol to his head to shoot himself, Nicola is frightened to see he’s wearing his Rupert face and, “panic-stricken”, bashes his wrist with the actual sword she’s carrying. The pistol falls and discharges, shooting a hole in the window beside Lawrie’s head and nearly hitting Rowan, who’s outside in the spinney. Because of course, when Peter checked the old pistols were safe, he didn’t do it properly. Didn’t I say that Peter and guns should never be allowed in the same place? Everyone hastily re-arranges the scene so that when Rowan arrives, they all look completely innocent, the pistol having fallen off the wall accidentally (although Lawrie is “quietly bleeding to death into her trousers pocket”). Rowan is not convinced, but can’t prove anything and at least she takes all the guns away. I’m just remembering when Peter was carrying around a pistol earlier, in case they met the neighbourhood drunk, and he playfully held it to Nicola’s head – imagine if it had gone off then. He’s so irresponsible!

Nicola, thoroughly fed up, announces she’s leaving Gondal, despite Lawrie saying she can’t, they need her and it’s “four to one”:

“I don’t care if it’s a billion to a quarter,” said Nicola, discarding family democracy at the same time as she put on her macintosh. “I think the whole thing’s quite mad. And I think those Brontës of Gin’s must have been absolutely mental, still doing it when they were thirty, nearly!”

Then Peter, who never wants to hear the word ‘Malise’ again in his life, banishes the others from the Hide. He takes the Malise paper and farm journals and “stuffed the whole thing away at the very bottom, underneath everything”, which is exactly how Peter always responds to trauma. Then he ponders how everything in the Hide transmogrified itself:

“The sovereigns had become farthings: Malise had turned from hero to villain: even the holiday itself had changed from whatever he’d planned into this Gondal nonsense: whatever Mr. Tranter might say, it did look as if Ted Colthard’s grandfather had–well–you never knew–”

Yes, Peter, let’s put all the blame on the devil on the roof. It couldn’t possibly have gone wrong due to your own character flaws.

Then there’s a nice scene between Nicola and Rowan, in which Rowan is leaning on a gate, “Saying ‘Aarrh’ to the crops. It makes them grow,” and Nicola discusses her plans for the rest of the holidays:

“Then I think I’ll have elevenses and then I’ll get Buster and go for a ride. And tomorrow, if that’s all right with you, I’ll come up to the lambing pen.”

Good for you, Nicola. And I hope the rest of your holidays are much better than the first bit.

Lawrie blames everyone else, but she’ll be fine, Gondalling away by herself in her bedroom. Patrick and Ginty are the most upset by the abrupt end of Gondal. Ginty says, “You could sort of find out how people feel when things happen to them, couldn’t you?”, which is what fiction does and suggests Antonia Forest isn’t completely against Gondalling. And Patrick says:

“I wish we could have gone on long enough to find out [what Rupert decided] … once we really got going, what was happening to Rupert felt much more important than anything that was happening to me … we could have gone back to before all this happened and seen why Rupert got like this … Anyway, it was much more fun being Rupert than me.”

So Gondalling did seem to have a psychological benefit for Patrick – it allowed him to consider how other people thought and felt, which is not something he seems to have done before this. After all, the only real danger they faced from Gondalling was due to Peter’s irresponsible attitude to guns. A winter holiday of escapism is not going to cause much harm to most children.

Ginty and Patrick are very sad that “from now on ordinary everyday life will have to serve”, but I don’t have too much sympathy for them, because they both have youth, good health, good looks, lots of money, servants and their very own ponies. And the book concludes with Patrick suggesting, “Let’s get The Idiot and Catkin and go for a ride.”

THE END

I can absolutely see why Victoria University has chosen Peter’s Room as a set text for their children’s literature course. Apart from being an enjoyable read, there’s so much to explore within the text, especially about the role of fantasy and fiction in children’s (and adults’) lives.

My personal favourite bits were the discussion about the Brontës, the talk Rowan and Nicola had about careers, and the scene with Nicola, Buster and the fox. I found the Gondal bits fairly tedious. I can see why they had to be there, but did they have to be so badly written and clumsily plotted? Of course, the children were ‘writing’ those bits and wouldn’t be expected to be brilliant at it, but I wondered if the clumsy prose reflected Antonia Forest’s opinion of High Fantasy. Did she like Lord of the Rings and Narnia and those sorts of books? I’d guess not from this book. I also got the impression that despite her stern warning about the dangers of Gondalling, she’d had a fair bit of daydreaming experience herself. And after all, she lived inside the imaginary world of the Marlows for decades.

The next Marlow book is The Thuggery Affair. Oh dear. Perhaps it’s not as bad as it sounds…

‘Peter’s Room’ by Antonia Forest
‘Peter’s Room’, Part Two
‘Peter’s Room’, Part Three
‘Peter’s Room’, Part Four
‘Peter’s Room’, Part Five
‘Peter’s Room’, Part Six