Category: young adult

Chapter Seven: The Costume for the Part

Lawrie and Peter walk home to have “dinner” (wouldn’t the Marlows be posh enough to call it “lunch”?) and the children again fail to inform Rowan, Ann or Mrs Marlow about all the criminal activity going on. Lawrie then dawdles about, re-doing her make-up, in the hope she’ll miss the train to Colebridge. She probably looks a bit like this (the Before, not the After):

Mrs Marlow is not impressed and tells Lawrie she’s not going anywhere until she scrubs off all that face paint and puts on her nice skirt and coat:

“I won’t have people supposing I’d let a child of mine run around looking as you do at this moment. Now do as I say.”

Mrs Marlow is in a very grumpy mood in this book. Perhaps she’s fed up with being left in the country to raise half-a-dozen children while her husband’s sailing around the world. (Maybe she’s afraid he has “a half-hitch in every port”?)

Meanwhile Ann has discovered Peter has packed the wrong library books to take to Colebridge Library (which is their cover story) and is fussing about repacking the books in Karen’s old music case. (Which also contains a dead and decaying pigeon, which isn’t even in a waterproof bag, ugh.) But Peter and Lawrie manage to escape, complete with pigeon and scandalous make-up, and talk loudly about their fake plans all the way to the station, for the benefit of the spying Thuggery. Lawrie just makes it onto the train, looking, she hopes, like a “James Bond kookie” and Peter goes off to be a decoy.

Chapter Eight: Old Man Kangaroo

I wasn’t familiar with Old Man Kangaroo, but it’s one of Kipling’s Just So stories, about how a kangaroo was chased by a dingo for a whole day. Anyway, Peter plans to ride his bike around the countryside, leading the Thuggery on a merry dance, but they’ve stolen his bike. Without much thought, he takes Ann’s magnificent new bike. He soon finds that three of the Thugs have accidentally-on-purpose thrown his bike into a newly-tarred road in front of a steamroller. Matt Carter, leader of the road gang, makes the Thugs try to extract the bike from the tar, ruining their fancy Ted clothes. The Thugs are temporarily powerless because “Matt Carter and his gang were nine, all larger and stronger than the Thuggery and all armed with pickaxes, spades and sledge-hammers”.

Peter then loudly announces to Matt that he’s found something, which he’s taking to Miss Culver. This is the start of a genuinely exciting, if somewhat implausible, chase scene. Soon the Thugs are shooting at Peter (“Anyone’d think they wanted to kill him!”), so he abandons Ann’s bike and hides in a ditch. The wimpiest Thug, Mr Luke, aka Yeller Feller, actually finds Peter but lets him escape.

Then Peter overhears a disquieting conversation between Kinky, Siberia and Mr Luke while Kinky destroys poor Ann’s bike. Kinky is planning to kill Peter by drowning him in the gravel pit pool, which will help Kinky’s campaign to overthrow Jukie as Number One Boy. Mr Luke is not happy about this, but is battered into submission by the others. Peter climbs through a disgusting drain into a stream and wades all the way to the sea, where he left his canoe. He plans to paddle back home, but he’s overturned by that pesky hidden tree root and then the Thuggery re-appear, still shooting at him. (Are they carrying about some sort of automatic rifle? Wouldn’t that be a bit conspicuous? They don’t seem to need to stop to reload their ammunition. Also, no one else seems to notice all the gunfire. Rural Dorset is a lot more like the Wild West than I ever imagined.)

Peter manages to dive underwater and swim to the opposite bank but the Thugs catch up. The Thugs are still firing what is now called “the air gun” (which apparently can kill people: “Air weapon injuries commonly involve teenage boys”). Then Kinky has the great idea of climbing along the top of the lock gate to reach Peter – but Peter opens the gate! And Kinky and his gun fall into the water! And Kinky can’t swim! And then Siberia falls in, trying to rescue him! Ha ha ha.

The Thuggery are indignant that Peter isn’t being more helpful (“It’s yore fault ’e’s there!”) but he does give them a few hints before sauntering off towards Trennels, wondering how he’ll ever be able to afford to buy Ann a new bike. Unfortunately, he’s not home yet and oh no, the Thuggery have dragged themselves out of the river and they want revenge.

Peter is being really brave here. He’s also too exhausted to run away, but when he sees the Thugs with their flick knives in the lane, he prepares to sacrifice himself to save Patrick, “in the traditions of the service”. But just as he prepares to go down fighting, Matt Carter and his steamroller Sarah come to the rescue:

“They an’ their knives an’ their three to one! Nuthin’ but dirty Teds, the pack of ’em! Sarah an’ you an’ me’ll show ’em! An’ they don’t jump out of the way we’ll flatten ’em!”

Hooray for Peter! Peter wins! Yeller Feller, “made bold by the passing of danger”, yells a vague threat about “tomorrow”:

“But of course, once in every lifetime, tomorrow never comes.”

Next: Character Part

If you’re interested, here are some Hep Cat teenagers in a coffee bar. They are not actually Thugs, though.

Chapter Five – A Brush with the Enemy

Peter and Lawrie go home to breakfast. Lawrie is dispirited by the idea that she’s not dishy, so she gets out her theatrical make-up. Peter is startled by the transformation of his little sister into a coffee-bar Jezebel, but the rest of the family politely ignore her (although Lawrie hopes that she’s shocked innocent, pious Ann). There’s a bit of a family argument over whether they should go to the cinema in Colebridge and we learn that the choice is The Magnificent Ambersons at the Regal, which they’ve all seen, or Cobweb! at the Majestic. Cobweb! “could only be science fiction” and Lawrie is scared by “monster tentacles”, so that’s out. Ann plans to collect nature samples for a Guiding project and Rowan is scranleting at Cold Comfort Farm. (There have always been Marlows at Trennels! Poor Rowan. But Ann’s the only one who’s sympathetic about the way Rowan’s life is turning out.) Lawrie doesn’t really want to get involved in Peter and Patrick’s pigeon plan, so says she’ll just stay at home, but her mother snaps:

“You surely aren’t going to spend the whole week-end moping round the house just because Nicky’s staying with Miranda?”

As Lawrie thinks, it’s NOT FAIR. But she obediently trails after Peter and Patrick as they take the pigeon to the local policeman, Tom Catchpole. (No one thinks to tell Mrs Marlow, the only parent around, about the drug-smuggling pigeon. But I suppose it’d be a very short book if they told her and she called the police and the mystery was solved.) Unfortunately, The Thuggery are trailing the children, so they come up with the plan that they’ll give the pigeon evidence to Lawrie and she’ll ride off on Peter’s bike if they get jumped; meanwhile, Patrick and Peter will talk loudly about going to Colebridge when they’re in the village shop and Patrick will pretend he just wants to ask Tom about a lost watch.

The Thuggery, who travel with a loud transistor radio playing with-it music such as Cliff Richard and The Shadows, chuck a cigarette packet at Lawrie, mimic Patrick’s posh accent and stand about looking menacing in front of Tom’s house. But Tom isn’t there – he’s been lured away by a fire in St Mary’s Church. Oh no! Of course, the children don’t leave a message with Tom’s wife or stash the evidence with her, because that would be sensible. On the way back, the Thuggery taunt them with enigmatic phrases:

“Have a drag, herbert!”
“Belshazzar it, herbert!”

This is not enigmatic to Peter, who (unlike Lawrie) was paying attention in Sunday School. So was I, so I know that Belshazzar was the son of Nebuchadnezzar and his death was foretold by mysterious writing appearing on the wall during a feast. I’m not convinced the Thugs would know that, but I guess there’s going to be a warning on a wall somewhere. As Patrick says,

“But why write on the wall? Wouldn’t paper be easier?”

Peter explains the Thuggery are “hairy characters” and “Natural born Piltdowners”, but “not actually dangerous”. (If they’re not dangerous, this is going to be a fairly boring thriller, so I assume this is Peter being clueless about other people, yet again. Also ‘Piltdown Man’ was revealed to be a fake in 1953, so does Peter mean the Thugs are frauds or that they’re primitive humans?)

Then there’s a discussion about whether Maudie Culver is part of the drug-smuggling. Jukie claimed she was “digging the integrity racket”, but Jukie’s a known liar. Patrick says that when he and Jon visited her pigeon lofts, she complained about not winning pigeon trophies because she refused to cheat, which suggests she is honest. But there was also a local scandal when a pigeon clock was tampered with to help her win a pigeon race, except the cheating was discovered and blamed on the Thuggery. Then Miss Culver ostentatiously banned herself from racing for a year. Patrick says it reminds him of:

“Those super-pious types at Mass who cross themselves each time they genuflect and say their rosaries very very slowly with their eyes half-shut. And bet your life they’ve got an old age pensioner doing the garden and they’re paying him a bob an hour if he’s lucky.”

I think he means Maudie would never break the law and wants everyone to know it, but she’s lacking in human compassion. Except she’s employing underprivileged boys when no one else in the village would give them a second chance (assuming they have criminal histories as minors). However, Peter thinks she might have planned the clock-cheating and then when she got caught, she did the self-penalty to cover up her guilt.

I find it hard to believe Maudie Culver is the brains behind a drug-smuggling racket, but her tirade at Peter certainly shows she’s unpleasant and possibly a bit deranged.

Chapter Six: Communications Cut

When the three children arrive at Patrick’s house, they find The Thuggery have trashed the stables and scrawled “HAVA DRAG” all over the walls. Patrick doesn’t reveal the true culprits to Sellars, the Merricks’ groom, because Sellars is “much too ancient to risk involving him”. Antonia Forest does some foreshadowing here by saying Sellars, a “wiry hard-as-nails sixty-year-old” is outraged by this when he hears about it a week later. And however old he is, a rural working man has to be tougher than Patrick and Peter.

Peter realises that HAVA DRAG means “smoke a cigarette” and Lawrie fishes the Thug’s cigarette packet out of the bin. In it, a Thug has written a violent threat to Patrick’s “daddy-o” in London. This all seems a very round-about way of threatening someone and even if the London drug gang are hardened professional criminals, there’s a big difference between them slashing one another with razors and actually murdering a Tory MP.

And while I’m on the subject, I don’t think transporting drugs by pigeon is a very clever idea. Firstly, a single pigeon can only carry a very small amount. Secondly, carrier pigeons often get lost or attacked by birds of prey or shot by boys like Peter or found by the wrong person. This is starting to sound even more ridiculous than the post-war Nazi spies in The Marlows and the Traitor.

Peter now reveals himself to be a pigeon expert, because his friend Selby’s Belgian grandfather keeps prize pigeons and by an AMAZING COINCIDENCE, Peter happens to know that the dead pigeon is a Scandaroon, which is good at flying over water. So the criminals are bringing the drugs from the Continent by boat and using the Culver Scandaroons to avoid Customs officials. Except Patrick has been to the Culver lofts and swears he never saw any Scandaroons there.

At this point, Patrick decides to phone his father (FINALLY), but the phone isn’t working. In fact, all the phones in the district have been cut off, which they find out when Rowan arrives to ask to use the phone because some louts have mutilated the poor Marlow cows. She drives off to get the vet. They should have told Rowan about The Thuggery and the pigeon! She’s a responsible adult (or near-adult).

And then the children discover they’ve lost the drug capsule. Peter put it in Lawrie’s pocket without telling her and now it’s gone. So they have no evidence of wrong-doing to show the police – EXCEPT FOR THE TRASHED STABLES AND THE WRITTEN CIGARETTE PACKET THREAT AND THEIR THREE EYEWITNESS ACCOUNTS OF THE CAPSULE BEING ATTACHED TO THE HARNESS AND OF JUKIE THREATENING REGINA. But apparently, the only way they can tell the police is if they find a capsule-carrying Scandaroon at the Culver place.

At this point, Patrick remembers his great-aunt Eulalia has written a detailed description of the Culver dovecote, a huge weird building separate to the pigeon loft. By an AMAZING COINCIDENCE, Eulalia published it privately and sent it only to her family members and there’s a copy in the room where they’re sitting. It’s a very long description. (An illustration would have been nice here, original publishers of this book.) Also by AMAZING COINCIDENCE, there’s a secret tunnel that leads from the secret priest’s room to the Culver place, so Patrick can sneak off and find a Scandaroon in the dovecote without any Thugs seeing him. Meanwhile, Lawrie will take the pigeon and harness to Colebridge police station and Peter will distract The Thuggery by looking for the lost capsule and leading them in a merry but futile chase.

Hmm. A plan that depends on Lawrie being sensible and brave does not seem like a very good plan to me.

Next: The Costume for the Part

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