‘Autumn Term’ by Antonia Forest

After hearing a lot of praise for Antonia Forest’s Marlow books, I was happy to find a reasonably-priced copy of the first in the series, Autumn Term, originally published in 1948. I had high expectations for this book and so far, a few chapters in, I’m liking it very much – and also having a lot of thoughts about it, so I’ve decided to blog about it as I read. If you aren’t much interested in British boarding school stories, you might want to avert your gaze from Memoranda for the next little while.

Chapter One: A Knife with Sixteen Blades

'Autumn Term' by Antonia ForestSo, the story begins with twins Nicola and Lawrie Marlow, aged twelve, on a train, nervously heading off for their first ever term at school. The twins are in a compartment with their sisters, of whom there seems to be a vast number. Karen is head girl, Rowan is a netball star, Ann’s a Girl Guide Patrol Leader, Ginty is … actually, I don’t know what Ginty’s talent is, but it’s definitely not being nice to her younger sisters. Admittedly, Nicola is bouncing around, making a nuisance of herself by asking a lot of questions about school. But the twins have the huge weight of family expectations on their (identical) shoulders. They have “an awful lot to live up to”. And they are reminding me a lot of Ron Weasley …

Nicola and Lawrie go out into the train’s corridor where they meet a dark-haired girl who’s all alone, is happy to share her stash of chocolate and is quickly revealed to be the Chosen One headmistress’s niece. Tim hasn’t been to school either, but at least she has an excuse because her father is a painter who travels the world and she does speak a lot of languages. The twins, though, haven’t been to school properly because “every time we started we always caught something” (contagious diseases, Nicola means, not fish or fire). So they haven’t attended school for the past seven years because they keep getting sick? Hopefully, they’ve had lots of home tutoring, because they’re expecting to be placed into Form IIIA – not IIIB and certainly not the dreaded Third Remove, which is for utter idiots. Tim is cheerfully resigned to being put into Third Remove, but Nick and Lawrie have decided they’re not just going straight into the top form, they’re going to be credits to their family in many, many fields of endeavour:

“…first we’ve got to get into the junior netball team, so that next year Nick can be captain and me vice. And then – we’ve been Brownies at home, you know – so we’re going to pass our Tenderfoot and fly up and get our Second Class badges all in one term.”

I have a sneaking suspicion that things are not going to go as planned for the twins.

Tim goes to have a peek at the famous Marlow sisters and the twins explain there are also two Marlow brothers, one in the navy and one at Dartmouth. So that’s eight of them – Giles, Karen, Rowan, Ann, Ginty, Peter and the twins. Their father’s a commander in the navy. Presumably their mother is slumped on a chaise longue, recovering from giving birth to at least eight children in ten years. It seems a very large number of children for an upper-middle-class English family in the 1940s. Are they Catholic? Is Kingscote a Catholic school?

Anyway, back in the train corridor, chocolate is munched and confidences are shared. Tim has a horror of being “quiet and dreary” and is planning to take advantage of her relationship with her headmistress aunt at every opportunity. Lawrie has a big crush on Margaret, the games captain, who’s Karen’s best friend. (I really hope there are actual lesbians in this book, but that’s probably expecting too much.) Lawrie got a nice watch for their going-away-to-school present, but Nicola proudly displays a super-duper knife with sixteen blades. Then the train jolts and the knife flies out the window! No, it’s okay, it’s resting on a ledge. They’ll retrieve it when the train stops. Wait, the train’s going through a tunnel. And when it emerges, THE KNIFE HAS DISAPPEARED!

Chapter Two: ‘A Fine of Five Pounds…’

‘In an emergency,’ Commander Marlow was given to telling his family, ‘act at once.’ On occasion he amplified this, saying that it was also necessary to think clearly and sensibly and not act upon impulse. Nicola, however, had absorbed only the dictum that she was to act immediately.

Nicola pulls the cord, stops the train and bounds off down into the tunnel. There is general uproar on the train because no one knows what is going on. Karen, head girl, is calm and sensible until she realises Nick has vanished. Lawrie becomes unhelpfully speechless. Nicola re-appears, luckily not squashed flat by another train, and is dragged back on board by the guard and Miss Cromwell, a nasty teacher who proceeds to berate poor Karen. Then Rowan comes to her rescue. The Marlow sisters regather in their compartment. Karen has a nervous breakdown and Ginty continues to be a giant pain:

‘I must tell Peter,’ burst out Ginty irrepressibly. ‘He’s always been absolutely wild to pull a communication cord or smash one of those things that stop elevators…’

‘Be quiet, Ginty,’ snapped Karen, without looking round.

‘You needn’t bite my head off,’ retorted Ginty. ‘For once, I haven’t done a thing.’

‘Oh, Gin, for heaven’s sake,’ said Rowan. ‘Don’t talk as if you were the tomboy of the Remove. All through the holidays you kept trying to give the impression that a mild case of bounds-breaking had brought you to the edge of expulsion. I could have throttled you.’

‘There was a row,’ said Ginty indignantly. ‘An awful row. Miss Keith said –’

‘I know you went round weeping for days after whatever Miss Keith said,’ said Rowan pitilessly, ‘but that still doesn’t make you the naughtiest girl in the Fourth.’

Rowan is the best. She walks Nicola up to school (while the others take a taxi) and shares some words of wisdom with her little sister. Nicola belatedly realises she could have been killed, or worse, expelled. When they reach school, they encounter an unfriendly presence:

‘Two more of your illustrious family to bring honour to the dear old school … And one of them stopped the train, I hear. Such a clever and original way of making the Marlows conspicuous the very first day.’

It’s Malfoy! No, it’s Lois Sanger. There is clearly bad blood between her and Rowan, but what could possibly have needled easy-going, sensible Rowan? Something netball-related? Meanwhile, Miss Keith, the headmistress, ticks off Karen, then Nicola. Chastened, they head upstairs to unpack.

All the sisters except Karen are sharing a dormitory together, which seems a bit weird. Wouldn’t it be more helpful for new girls to be in a dorm with their classmates? Ginty, in addition to everything else, is UNTIDY. I’m really not seeing the point of Ginty so far, but maybe she has hidden talents. Also, each girl is permitted two framed photographs on her dressing-chest and Nicola has a portrait of Nelson and a photo of her brother Giles’s ship! Not Giles, just his ship.

Okay, so I’m wondering whether this is actually set in the late 1940s? There’s no mention of the war or rationing or Blitz damage. And if it was post-WWII, wouldn’t Nicola worship a more recent naval hero than Nelson (not that I can think of any particularly stellar performances by the British Navy during WWII, off hand). Also, where is this school? They take a ‘southern region’ train, there’s a cathedral in the town and it’s by the sea. I suppose it could be fictional, but I’m going to try and figure it out.

Malfoy Lois Sanger has the last word in this chapter, as the twins rush past her on their way downstairs to meet Tim. ‘I always feel it must be so gratifying to be a Marlow,’ she says sarcastically. I have a feeling Lois is going to cause major trouble at some stage …

Next, Chapter Three: A Form Examination.

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You might also be interested in reading:

‘Autumn Term’: Part Two
‘Autumn Term’: Part Three
‘Autumn Term’: Part Four
‘Autumn Term’: Part Five
‘Autumn Term’: Part Six
‘Autumn Term’: Part Seven
‘Autumn Term’: Part Eight

‘The Genius of Birds’ by Jennifer Ackerman

'The Genius of Birds' by Jennifer AckermanCould there be a book title more perfectly designed to appeal to my interests? Jennifer Ackerman’s new book is a fascinating exploration of bird intelligence, which begins with a description of the New Caledonian crow’s amazing ability to make and use tools in a variety of contexts. Of course, other birds also use found objects – to hook food out of holes, to carry water or honey to their nests, even to fight off enemies (with one documented case of a crow and a jay having a ‘sword’ fight with a sharp twig). However, tool use is just one of an awe-inspiring array of abilities displayed by birds.

I was especially interested to read about the complex social skills of different bird species. Birds tease one another, play together, teach useful skills to younger birds and console family members after an upsetting event. Some of them spy on and steal from their rivals, kidnap baby birds or feign injury to fool an enemy. They are sensitive to injustice and, just like dogs and primates, will refuse to work for a smaller reward than their peers. They can choose to delay gratification to receive a bigger reward later (which many humans struggle to do) and will bring gifts to those who have rescued or fed them (although not necessarily gifts that most humans will appreciate – one girl in Seattle received buttons, screws, hinges, a tiny plastic tube and a rotting crab claw).

Bird song is also complex, with many similarities to human language. Just like humans, young birds have an instinctual urge to vocalise, with an ‘optimal period’ of learning. Like humans, they learn by imitation and practice, although some birds are far superior to humans in the number of ‘languages’ they can learn and show amazing acoustic consistency when singing a particular song. Birds sing the dialect particular to their local area and can show ‘speech defects’, such as a stutter.

Other human-like abilities include architectural and artistic skills. There’s a wonderful description of an Australian satin bowerbird building not a nest, but a boudoir for attracting and seducing females:

“First, he furiously clears debris from an area about a yard square and then sets about diligently collecting twigs and grasses, which he distributes evenly to make his ‘platform’. From this collection, he selects choice twigs to plant in two neat rows, creating a kind of avenue carefully positioned to catch the morning strike of sun. At the northern end, he arranges his bed of fine twigs, evening it out. This will serve as the background for his panoply of decorations – and also as a sort of dance floor, where he will later offer up some showy pirouette and song.

Next comes the business of collecting treasures. Not just any object will do. This bird is bullish on blue: cornflower-blue tail feathers from a parrot, lavender lobelia blossoms, shiny blue fruits from the quandong tree, purple petunias, and blue delphiniums stolen from a nearby homestead, along with fragments of cobalt glass or pottery, navy blue hair ribbons, bits of turquoise tarp, blue bus tickets, straws, toys, ballpoint pens, that [turquoise glass] eyeball, and his prize, a baby-blue pacifier pilfered from his neighbor. These he arranges artfully against his twig canvas. If his flowers wither or his berries shrivel, he’ll replace them with fresh ones. Watch for a few more days, and you might see him paint a chest-high band on the inside of his twig hall, using dried hoop pine needles he has chewed and crushed in his beak.”

Other birds build ingenious nests from natural and human-made materials, with sparrows even adding cigarette butts (which contain chemicals that repel bird parasites).

There’s an engrossing discussion of how pigeons and migratory birds manage their extraordinary feats of navigation and memory, which leads to a critique of our biased, anthropocentric definitions of ‘intelligence’. The author ends with a sober warning about how human activity – hunting, deforestation, pollution and climate change – is already threatening some bird species. Within a few decades, the effect on bird diversity could be catastrophic and this book demonstrates just how much we would lose.

Anyone with the slightest interest in birds will find this book fascinating, but it will also appeal to those interested in the wider field of human and animal cognition. Highly recommended!

You might also be interested in reading:

‘Alex and Me’ by Irene M. Pepperberg

‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ by Diana Wynne Jones

I have had a mixed reaction to the novels of Diana Wynne Jones so far. I enjoyed Dogsbody, I thought Charmed Life was okay, I loathed Fire and Hemlock. I was also a bit put off by DWJ’s fans, some of whom display almost religious levels of devotion to her. This obliges them to not only promote her work assiduously, but also disparage anyone else who’s had the audacity to write children’s fantasy, especially if those writers manage to sell more books than their idol. (I mean, didn’t J. K. Rowling realise that Diana Wynne Jones was the only British author ever allowed to write about orphans attending magic school?)

'Howl's Moving Castle' by Diana Wynne JonesHowever, I’ve just finished Howl’s Moving Castle and finally understand what DWJ’s fans are going on about, because this book was utterly charming – funny, clever, warm-hearted and featuring some of the most endearing characters I’ve come across in children’s fantasy. The dreaded Wizard Howl, rumoured to suck the souls from innocent young girls or maybe eat their hearts, turns out to be far less evil than suspected, although with enough flaws to fill a (moving) castle. There’s also Calcifer, his adorably grumpy demon, Michael, the anxious apprentice and Sophie, the valiant heroine placed under a curse by a wicked witch. The author has a lot of fun playing with fantasy conventions – seven-league boots, magical disguises, mysterious spells, supernatural battles, kings sending magicians on dangerous quests and so on – although my favourite part was when the magical world collided with the real one. In one chapter, Sophie and Michael accompany Howl to his original home in the “land of Wales”. Sophie is baffled by the clothes (Howl dons a baggy jacket with the strange inscription “WELSH RUGBY”) and by the technology, which includes magical boxes with moving pictures, the boxes growing “on long, floppy white stalks that appeared to be rooted in the wall”. Throughout, the plot twists and turns in a very inventive and complicated manner, but it all ends as it should, with evil vanquished and the good living happily ever after.

The edition I read had some excellent illustrations by Tim Stevens (the scarecrow is especially creepy) and a lovely cover with Howl looking supernaturally handsome and his castle looming darkly in the background. But then I remembered this book was made into a much-loved animated film and went looking for the trailer and it looks TERRIBLE. The castle is all wrong! Everyone speaks American! The story looks more like a Disney princess romance than anything else! It doesn’t seem like the sort of film that even mentions “WELSH RUGBY”. However, if any of you have seen it and think it worth watching, I may give it a try. Also, if you have any recommendations for Diana Wynne Jones books that are just like Howl’s Moving Castle but nothing like Fire and Hemlock, I would be very interested to hear them.

‘Party Animals: My Family and Other Communists’ by David Aaronovitch

Party Animals is a fascinating memoir about growing up in a British Communist family during the Cold War, written by David Aaronovitch, the son of Sam Aaronovitch, Communist Party worker and Marxist economist, lecturer and writer. (David Aaronovitch also happens to be the eldest brother of Ben Aaronovitch, author of the Rivers of London series1, who makes a brief appearance in this book, aged three months, attending his first May Day rally.) As David Aaronovitch explains, being a Communist in the 1960s meant living a life set apart from most of their neighbours:

“We didn’t believe in God, go to church, stand up for the Queen in the cinema when they played the national anthem (which in any case, wasn’t our anthem, our anthem being the Internationale). We didn’t moan about strikes, because we liked them, and we would complain about South African oranges in the local greengrocer’s when most people had no conception of food being political.”

'Party Animals' by David AaronovitchDavid and his siblings attended Socialist Sunday School (where “much of the time was taken up with writing and rehearsing plays with a suitably socialist or anti-fascist theme”), played with folksy wooden toys imported from Eastern Europe, celebrated the success of Soviet cosmonauts, went on Party-sponsored camping holidays to Bulgaria and of course, took an active part in weekly marches and protest rallies. His account of his childhood is remarkably balanced. He is able, for example, to admire the Party’s commitment to social justice and education, while bitterly regretting that his parents refused to allow him to apply for a scholarship to Westminster or even attend the local grammar school (he was sent to a Party-approved comprehensive secondary school, where he was bullied and his academic performance plummeted). He also writes approvingly of how his parents and their comrades fought against racism, at a time when no one else in Britain (especially racist trade unions) seemed to care much about the rights of non-white British workers, let alone take any interest in the US civil rights movement or anti-apartheid protestors in South Africa.

However, he also questions how the adults who brought him up – mostly thoughtful, compassionate, intelligent people – could give such unquestioning support to the Soviet Union for so long. Somehow these people had managed to ignore any misgivings caused by the 1930s Soviet purges, Stalin’s 1939 pact with the Nazis, Stalin’s subsequent backflip in 1941, the Katyn massacre and other wartime Soviet atrocities. But then came indisputable evidence of Soviet evil – the 1950s show trials, the invasion of Hungary, Kruschev’s famous speech denouncing Stalin as a murderous despot, the invasion of Czechoslovakia – and still Party members refused to admit they’d ever been wrong. It was, the author decides, not unlike a deep religious faith. He notes that his mother, in particular, valued loyalty above all and despised anyone who was cowardly enough to leave the Communist Party:

“In a way everyone was right. It could be cowardly to leave and courageous to stay. The leavers no longer had to face those Cold War battles in which they were always on the wrong side of received opinion. The stayers, on the other hand, maintained their commitment in the face of everything the bourgeois media could throw at them.

But it could also be cowardly to stay and courageous to leave. The leavers went from the comfortable if constricting shape of a life in the Party, their certainties and their relationships all abandoned. The stayers carried on in the familiar routines, buying the Party paper, attending meetings, knowing exactly where they were on almost any issue in any country of the world.

And, to an extent, the longer you’d stayed already and the more you’d endured, the longer you would stay and endure […] If you’d suffered for the cause, you thought more highly of it. This is one reason why being rude to someone whose political ideas you think are stupid – however truthful you are being or however satisfying it is to do – is more likely to confirm them in their opinions than change their mind. The greater the sacrifice, the greater the commitment.”

His mother’s belief in duty, loyalty and sacrifice – and her firm denial of the truth – extended to her marriage. Her husband was often absent on ‘Party business’ (which included affairs with Party women), leaving her to bring up three children by herself on very little money. Her own childhood had been marked by loss and abandonment and she was an intelligent woman who’d been denied an education. She took out her frustrations on her eldest son, which led to the whole family ending up in psychotherapy with Robin Skynner, who used them as a case study in one of his famous books, One Flesh, Separate Persons: Principles of Family and Marital Psychotherapy. This book, in combination with his late mother’s diaries, allows Aaronovitch to examine how his mother and others “insisted on being lied to” in many aspects of their lives, although this section is frustratingly brief. I would have liked to have learned how this affected the author himself in later life, in both his political beliefs and personal life, and I would have loved to have heard more from his siblings. I can understand someone might be reluctant to explore such a personal topic in great depth, but in that case, why choose to write a memoir? Despite this quibble, I found Party Animals engrossing, thoughtful and often very funny. It will appeal to those interested in Cold War politics, but I also think it will resonate with any readers brought up in religious and/or dysfunctional families.

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  1. Speaking of which, the publication date of the next Rivers of London novel, The Hanging Tree, has been pushed back yet again, this time to September 2017. What is going on, Gollancz? WE NEED TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT. ↩

What I’ve Been Reading : Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

For various reasons, I haven’t felt up to reading anything new lately, so I’ve been working my way through old favourites from my bookshelves. This has included a whole shelf of novels and short stories by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. I find her work consistently engrossing, although I’m not sure why, because she wrote the same story over and over again. Generally a Westerner – someone from America or Britain, usually with German parents or grandparents – arrives in India with great enthusiasm and is either gradually or suddenly disillusioned. Often there is a guru involved, who may or may not be as benevolent as he initially seems. In her later work, the setting is New York or London and the master is a tempestuous Central European musician or psychiatrist or academic, but the theme is the same – that the characters must efface themselves to reach true fulfilment, which rarely turns out to equal true happiness.

Her fiction always seems very autobiographical and in her introduction to Out of India, entitled ‘Myself in India’, she wrote:

'Out of India' by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

“I have lived in India for most of my adult life. My husband is Indian and so are my children. I am not, and less so every year […] There is a cycle that Europeans – by Europeans I mean all Westerners, including Americans – tend to pass through. It goes like this: first stage, tremendous enthusiasm – everything Indian is marvellous; second stage, everything Indian is not so marvellous; third stage, everything Indian abominable. For some people it ends there, for others the cycle renews itself and goes on. I have been through it so many times that now I think of myself strapped to a wheel that goes round and round and sometimes I’m up and sometimes I’m down.”

She was particularly interested in religion and “whether religion is such a potent force in India because life is so terrible, or is it the other way round – is life so terrible because, with the eyes of the spirit turned elsewhere, there is no incentive to improve its quality?” The heart of her problem, she said, was this:

“To live in India and be at peace, one must to a very considerable extent become Indian and adopt Indian attitudes, habits, beliefs, assume if possible an Indian personality. But how is this possible? […] Sometimes it seems to me how pleasant it would be to say yes and give in and wear a sari and be meek and accepting and see God in a cow. Other times it seems worthwhile to be defiant and European and – all right, be crushed by one’s environment, but all the same have made some attempt to remain standing.”

'The Nature of Passion' by Ruth Prawer JhabvalaThis author is probably best known for her Booker Prize-winning novel, Heat and Dust, and her Academy Award-winning script writing for the films of Merchant and Ivory. I like Heat and Dust, a book that contrasts historical and modern British attitudes towards India, and the film is pretty good, too. But my favourite Ruth Prawer Jhabvala novel about India would have to be The Nature of Passion. It’s a clever, droll, beautifully constructed story about a family in New Delhi in the 1950s. Lalaji is one of the new super-rich, a man who has acquired millions of rupees by a combination of ruthless scheming, graft and sheer hard work and believes his security lies in sticking to traditional Hindu values. His youngest offspring, however, have opposing ambitions. Chandra is trying to establish a squeaky-clean career in the Civil Service, Viddi wants to travel to Paris to be an art critic, and beautiful Nimmi longs to be modern and independent and marry for love. A crisis looms for Lalaji when a politician begins a campaign against bribery and corruption:

“Bribery and corruption! These were foreign words, it seemed to him, and the ideas behind them were also foreign. Here in India, he thought, one did not know such words. Giving presents and gratifications to Government officers was an indispensable courtesy and a respectable, civilised way of carrying on business. It was a custom, a tradition even, and hence should be respected; not tampered with by upstart Deputy Ministers who had been abroad and brought home unsuitable ideas.”

For those who prefer short stories, Out of India is a good representative collection of her work, although I also like A Stronger Climate because it divides the stories into two useful categories, ‘The Seekers’ and ‘The Sufferers’. I also enjoyed My Nine Lives: Chapters of a Possible Past, in which the nine stories, set in India, America and Britain, explore fictional “alternative destinies” for the author.
'Shards of Memory' by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

When it comes to her novels set (mostly) outside India, the one I keep returning to is Shards of Memory, a family saga involving a wealthy Anglo-German-Indian family living in New York and linked to a mysterious spiritual Master. I don’t know why I like it so much, because it’s certainly not flawless (for one thing, it ends too abruptly). I think it must be the characters, who are so complicated and eccentric and oddly endearing. I especially like Henry, the young man who reluctantly accepts his destiny as the Master’s heir, and Henry’s grandfather Graeme, a cynical British diplomat – and also, possibly, a spy…