Tag: Antonia Forest

Summer holidays are nearly over, but first there’s the gymkhana. (I have never had to write that word before and I’m struck by how weird it is. What have horses got to do with gyms? According to my dictionary, ‘gymkhana’ was derived in the 19th century “from Urdu gendḵānah ‘racket court,’ from Hindi geṁd ‘ball’ + Persian ḵānah ‘house’ … altered by ‘gymnasium’ via Latin from Greek ‘exercise naked,’ from gumnos ‘naked’”. Maybe related to polo?)

Anyway, Nicola is riding Mr Buster, Patrick’s pony, in various ‘fun’ events like Potato Races and Musical Poles, which she’s only doing because she needs to win some money to pay for Sprog’s upkeep. When she arrives, there are a lot of Serious Pony People doing horsey things (“Nicola didn’t often feel shy or out of it, but she did now”). Worse, there are death glares from a girl who turns out to be Wendy Reynolds, the girl Lawrie accidentally imitated at the elocution competition and who mistakes Nicola for Lawrie. Uh oh…

Ginty turns up to watch, because the other Marlows are all busy killing wasps at Trennels. Ginty, it turns out, is what Nicola calls “a Pony Club type”, although maybe Ginty gets it from her mother (“Mummy was talking about hunting this winter”). So, Mrs Marlow must have had a fairly posh country upbringing, to have grown up hunting? Wendy Reynolds and her brother Oliver have TEN horses and win just about every event. But Wendy gets her revenge on the Marlows by barging Mr Buster, telling Nicola the apple in the obstacle race has a wasp on it, and worst of all, riding her horse at Mr Buster, causing him to hurt his leg and Nicola to fall off.

Patrick is quite rightly furious about Mr Buster (although, of course, doesn’t even check to see if Nicola’s hurt) and tells off Oliver. But then Peter and Lawrie arrive with a dramatic account of how the wasp-killing in the attics turned into Trennels nearly burning down and it was ALL ANN’S FAULT:

“…and there was Ann, holding a candle, exactly as if she wanted to start a fire and the beam smoking away like mad … Ann went completely and utterly mad and called the fire brigade! … And Daddy was livid and Ann couldn’t say anything, ’cos it was her fault …”

I must be missing something, because wasn’t it a good thing to call the fire brigade? They couldn’t be sure they’d put the fire out and it was a wooden roof. Unless they have to pay lots of money for the fire fighters? Is this meant to show that Ann subconsciously wants to destroy the family home? Or is this simply another dig at Ann’s well-meaning but useless attempts at helping?

Lawrie also learns about Wendy’s revenge and goes off to recite the poem again to Wendy. So there is some sort of justice for poor Nicola.

Rowan and Patrick then compete in a tense show-jumping event, which is extra-tense for Nicola because Rowan has promised to share her prize money if she wins. But alas, Rowan’s horse falls and Patrick wins! What will happen to poor Sprog now? Except then Oliver Reynolds comes up and offers Nicola all of his and his sister’s prize money. I think this is meant to present an ethical dilemma, but of course Nicola refuses the money, just as she refused to report Wendy’s cheating to the judges. I’m not really sure what this says about Marlow morality. It’s important never to make a fuss? Leave judgement of others to God?

Nicola miserably contemplates how to tell Patrick to let Sprog go, while Patrick gloats all the way back about his win. At home, he unkindly tells his father “the entire Gymkhana consisted of Marlows lying in heaps in the ring”, but then his father hands over a cheque to Nicola from selling The Boke of Falconerie. It’s for eighty-seven pounds! Nicola is rich and Sprog is saved! Hooray! Good has triumphed, courtesy of God or the Fates (or Antonia Forest).

And that’s the end of Falconer’s Lure. There was a lot to enjoy in it, but I do think my favourite Marlow book so far has been Autumn Term. I am really looking forward to getting back to the Kingscote girls in End of Term, which I’ve ordered from Girls Gone By.

You might also be interested in reading:

‘Falconer’s Lure’ by Antonia Forest
‘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

I’m sorry for the lengthy delay in blog posting, but I’ve been caught up in a flurry of self-publishing tasks (SO MUCH TO DO). Anyway, on with the reading.

Chapter X: High Diving

The Sprog is not doing well at the whole learning-to-hunt thing, so Patrick loses his temper and says they must abandon the sweet little merlin to the wild, even though he “probably wouldn’t survive the winter”. Nicola is horrified and offers to take over all his care, but Patrick refuses:

“Jael was dead, Regina had abandoned him, and The Sprog (regarded as a hawk) was useless. He didn’t want him hanging round, a reminder of better things, and, in an unhappy, dog-in-the-mangerish sort of way, he didn’t want Nicola to have him either.”

So they leave poor Sprog in a field – but he flies after Nicola and lands on her shoulder! So she is going to look after him through the rest of the holidays and then take him with her to school. Awww! I like Sprog. Even though I’m not really sure how keeping a hawk at school is going to work.

The rest of the chapter is about the family at the beach doing various sea-related activities, in their own unique Marlow ways. Nicola, for once, is merely a spectator. Lawrie forgets her swimming cap, comes spectacularly last in Beginners’ Swimming, cries about it, has to be coaxed into her diving event, performs creditably, throws a tantrum when Peter steals her wishbone at lunch, then goes off happily to her tea party with the actress-judge. As Peter astutely observes, Lawrie “might be two years younger than Nick sometimes, instead of only two hours.”

Rowan effortlessly wins her swimming and diving events. Ginty, also a good diver although she lost her last school competition, didn’t even want to come to the beach, but was forced along by the family. She decides to disappear after lunch, so she can be all special and sorrowful in solitude. She is, at least, aware that her ‘friend’ Unity is ridiculous and that it’s all posturing. I do have some sympathy for Ginty in this chapter, because if you can’t be a bit emo when you’re a fifteen-year-old girl, then when can you? Unfortunately, she hasn’t told anyone where she’s gone, which worries Karen and prompts Ann to walk all the way to Trennels and back in the heat, searching for her. Mrs Marlow is the most annoyed she’s been so far when she finds out about this, snapping: “Another time, if someone wants you to do something you don’t want to do, say so.” Except Ginty DID say so, and no one paid any attention to her! She was forced to enter the events and forced to come along! Anyway, she does end the chapter resolving to drop Unity, so that’s one good thing.

Apart from spending hours looking for Ginty, poor Ann has to put up with constant condescension from her siblings. Peter and Nicola are so blatantly rude that Rowan tells them off for being unkind, which shocks Nicola. But even then Rowan is patronising, saying “those sweetly pretty thoughts [Ann] gets are quite genuine” and “she’s a kind girl, after her fashion” and that Ann just can’t help being “sloppy”. If I were Ann, I’d leave home as soon as I possibly could. She could train as a nurse and then go off to work in Africa or somewhere else that’s far, far away from her family.

However, this chapter is mostly about Peter’s holiday finally improving. He wins his sailing race by ten lengths and his father is observed looking “surprised but very pleased” (for once). Mind you, Peter’s a Dartmouth cadet and a Marlow, so he’s had far more experience and training than any of his competitors. Nicola cheers loudly when he wins and is instantly hushed because even though Marlows are expected to win everything, one mustn’t ever celebrate that in public. Then there’s a long, tense high-diving contest between Peter and Patrick, in which Peter has to battle his fear of heights:

“He started up the ladder, thinking, as he had so often thought before, that once he’d done this, he’d find himself on the other side of fear, like jumping through a paper hoop. And then he knew he wouldn’t. There would always be more paper hoops.”

Anyway, he triumphs. But then, when Patrick goes to congratulate him, Peter snubs him! And then Patrick apologises for calling Peter a lily-livered loon and a murderer and Peter oh-so-graciously deigns to forgive Patrick! Can I just point out that Peter has NEVER apologised for putting Patrick’s life in danger on the cliffs or thanked Patrick for holding him safely in place till their rescue or said sorry for killing Jael. If anyone deserves to feel injured, it’s Patrick!

Right, that’s it, I’ve had it with Peter. He’s so awful, he makes Patrick look good.

Next, Chapter XI: The Jump-Off

I wasn’t familiar with the song Nicola performed in the previous chapter, so I looked it up and found this beautiful version by mezzo-soprano Sophie Macrae:

It’s so sad. No wonder people kept bursting into tears when they heard it. Anyway, on with the reading.

Chapter IX: Lost Hawk

Patrick and Nicola go chasing off after Regina the peregrine falcon, who was startled into flight by Tessa. Hours later, they track Regina down to where she’s settled on a church tower in a village the other side of the Crowlands. Patrick decides they have to stay there until sunrise, but it’s okay – they can spend the night with his cousin, the local vicar. First he goes off to phone his mother, who is in a panic because she thinks the children have disappeared because they’ve been on the cliffs again. This seems a perfectly reasonable fear to me, but Patrick is “distinctly injured” by her assumption that he’s done something thoughtless and dangerous.

Then he goes off to talk to his cousin, who turns out to be away, replaced by an unfamiliar locum vicar with “absolute hordes of strange children”, all being “dreadfully friendly”. Oh, the horror! Patrick runs away, pursued by a bemused Nicola:

“… here was Patrick still flushed with embarrassment, his hands still shaking as they held the reins. Suddenly Nicola remembered something he had said that very first morning: I can’t meet eight perfectly strange people before breakfast. And he never had been to Trennels, either. It came to Nicola that Patrick, more than anyone she had met so far, was genuinely and painfully shy.”

I would usually have deepest sympathies for a shy character, but Patrick isn’t just shy. He’s also got a massive superiority complex, is completely self-centred, and seems to have very little interest in understanding other people’s motivations or emotions. But I do think this scene demonstrates how empathetic Nicola is – that she feels for him, even though she has almost no fear of anything herself.

Nicola is also happy that she’ll get to sleep under the stars for once. Patrick sends her off to get milk from a farm (“You go. You look younger and more in need of milk.”), and they find a river to water the horses and have their own Famous-Five-style picnic supper on the grassy bank (but draw the line at whittling themselves toothbrushes out of twigs, as people do “in books”). Then they find a haystack to sleep in, which means actually burying themselves neck-deep in the hay. I like all these little details, including Bucket the dog looking “mildly surprised” when he’s told the hay is his kennel for the night. I did find myself thinking, “But … snakes! And spiders!” until I remembered this was tame English countryside, not the Australian bush, so there was unlikely to be any deadly wildlife lurking about.

Patrick and Nicola also have a philosophical chat about death. Patrick discusses what he wants to do with his life, “provided one really got one’s three-score-and-ten” and Nicola, remembering Jon, says, “I suppose one ought to do all the things one most wants to first, just in case.”

Patrick also reveals that an invisible ghost walks up and down the corridor outside his bedroom, and that one night he went out to meet it:

“ … then it – got awfully cold suddenly. I’ve always thought it must have walked through me, but it may just have been me being petrified […] But – well, I’ve never told anyone this before, because I don’t really believe it myself. But the next day I fell off Leeper’s Bluff.”

Spooky! (Except possibly he talked himself into a state of anxiety before and after the ‘ghost’ encounter, which meant his sleep was disturbed, and it made him so distracted and fatigued that he fell off the cliff the next day. Which is how you’d interpret this episode, if you were a boring rationalist like me.)

The next morning, Regina flies off and Patrick seems calm and resigned about it, to Nicola’s surprise. He admits that it was “madly stupid” to expect anyone to keep Regina at school, and that he’d only chased after her yesterday because “you know how one goes on with a thing, until you’ve simply got to stop because it isn’t there any more.” But luckily, they find her caught in an old wartime camouflage net, so they’re able to remove her bells and jesses and then off she flies, completely free, not even recognising Patrick any more.

Now there’s only sweet little Sprog left in the hawk-house. Nicola wants to keep him, but Patrick is adamant – Sprog must learn how to hunt properly and then he’ll be set free, too.

Next, Chapter X: High Diving

Chapter VII: Jael in the Evening

Honestly, Peter is the absolute limit! First, he agrees to go cliff-climbing with Patrick and Nicola, even though he’s terrified of heights and knows he has panic attacks. Of course, he freezes on the cliff face, so Nicola has to go off for help and Patrick has to stay with Peter and try to calm him down and stop him falling off. I’m no fan of Patrick, but he behaves very sensibly when the crisis hits. He does call Peter a “famous clot of a lily-livered loon”, but Patrick says worse to the hawks and Nicola. The coastguard eventually rescues them and Nicola feels everything’s fine now:

“…they’d had all they needed in the way of a row from the coastguards; there was no reason to tell their parents, just for the fun of another; there they all were, safe and sound, and the fewer people who knew, the better.”

Nicola has reckoned without the local newspaper, which only a few hours later is screaming “LOCAL M.P.’S SON IN CLIFF DRAMA”! (Almost as fast as Twitter, that newspaper.) Captain Marlow hits the roof, which is not unreasonable given that the three children could have been killed. Patrick very nearly was killed on that same cliff a couple of years earlier. But Captain Marlow’s not just furious at Peter – “he blamed Nicola quite as much for not telling Patrick Peter simply wasn’t safe on heights”. How is that Nicola’s fault? Certainly she should have told her parents what had happened afterwards, but it’s understandable that she didn’t, given she’s been brought up not to complain or make any fuss or talk about traumatic experiences. The real blame, in my opinion, lies with Peter, Patrick and Captain Marlow, in that order. Peter is fourteen (I think?), certainly old enough to take responsibility for his own actions and to be able to come up with some face-saving excuse when asked to do something he’s incapable of doing. Patrick is even older and knows the dangers of that cliff. And Captain Marlow is the reason Peter is so determined to prove himself in ridiculous displays of manly courage and is so unable to admit to any weakness. Nicola, being the youngest and a girl, had no real influence on Patrick and Peter’s decisions, even if she’d wanted to tell Patrick about Peter’s fear of heights.

Anyway, Nicola goes off to meet Patrick the next morning and discovers his father had gone off “like an A-bomb”. Mr Merrick doesn’t seem to hold it against Nicola, though, and says The Boke of Falconerie is valuable, perhaps even worth five pounds, and he offers to sell it for her.

But then, a few days later, Patrick and Nicola take Jael rabbiting and Peter happens to be there, being irresponsible with his shotgun as usual, and he KILLS JAEL. That beautiful hawk, ready to be released into the wild, dead! And Peter doesn’t even apologise! He just loudly insists that he didn’t do it deliberately.

“Patrick said nothing. He did believe him, really. But he felt so hurt and sorry over Jael’s death, he wanted to make sure someone else was hurt too. And it couldn’t be Nicola, with that white, quivering look on her face.”

At least poor Jael was killed instantly, so she didn’t suffer. But I think Patrick would be well within his rights never to speak to Peter again.

Chapter VIII: Lawrie’s Sort of Day

Lawrie is just as ridiculous as Peter, but at least her ridiculousness is much less likely to be lethal. She does have some sympathy for Peter, telling Nicola he’s having a “fairly mouldy holiday”:

“Seeing Cousin Jon’s plane thing. Getting stuck on that cliff. Shooting Patrick’s hawk. I expect he minds, don’t you?”

Well, the last two of those were Peter’s fault. He’d better do something worthwhile by the end of the book, or I’ve had it with him.

Anyway, Lawrie, Nicola and Ann go to Colebridge for their festival competitions. Ann and Nicola have stage-fright, but Lawrie is her usual egomaniacal self, so much so that even placid Ann snaps at her. None of the Marlows seems to like Ann much. She’s just there in the background, being quietly helpful and kind and good, while they make fun of her. Her mother doesn’t want her to be a nurse and makes vague noises about Ann being a music teacher and Lawrie suggests being a concert pianist, but Ann says she’d hate being famous:

“I could understand it if what you wanted was to give pleasure, and–and interpret really great work. I think that would be a reason for being a concert pianist. But even then, I think being a nurse, if it’s a thing you can do, is better.”

This makes Nicola want to be sick from the sentimentality of it, but I don’t see what’s wrong with wanting to do good in the world. (Also, it turns out Ann is religious. Maybe she’ll end up a missionary. Or a nun, except I don’t think the Marlows are Catholic.)

Nicola goes off alone to her singing competition and is suddenly shaken by her song’s lyrics about death, because they remind her of Jael. Even then, with all that bottled-up grief, she tries to be sensible:

“You couldn’t, you simply couldn’t go in for a singing comp, and begin to cry in the middle of it because of the sadness of your own song; in spite of herself, Nicola gave a little shiver of laughter; because it was funny, the notion of Nicola Marlow boo-hooing loudly while everyone waited respectfully for her to go on.”

She pulls herself together, sings beautifully and would have come first if she hadn’t had to stop in the middle of her song. Well done, Nicola (although it’s okay to cry about death, even if you are a Marlow).

Then Lawrie, who hasn’t bothered to rehearse her poem, accidentally imitates her previous competitor and is disqualified by the semi-famous actress judge, who thinks Lawrie was being facetious. Lawrie runs off crying and poor identical Nicola is told off by the judge. At least this makes her father think Nicola’s been punished enough, so things are friendly again and he gives her ten bob as a reward for her singing. Which makes Lawrie cry again, although later Lawrie does have “one of her unexpected moments of looking at herself objectively, and finding the sight awfully funny”.

Then Lawrie hatches a ridiculous scheme to make things better – she will track down the actress-judge, so Lawrie can recite her poem properly and thus be discovered as an exciting new theatrical talent. Nicola, feeling “unusually helpless”, is dragged along. Unfortunately, the scheme works and Lawrie is not only driven back to Trennels (with Nicola invisible in the front seat), but invited to tea with the actress. Lawrie will be unbearable now…

Chapter Five: Jael is Entered and Peter Gate-crashes

Nicola continues to learn about hawking and Patrick continues to be obnoxious. Nicola is unhappy about watching Jael’s training, which involves showing Jael a live rabbit and then disembowelling the poor rabbit as soon as the hawk grabs it, and also letting a rabbit loose with a cross tied to it so it can’t escape down a burrow. Patrick says it’s “terrifically humane and nothing the R.S.P.C.A. could even begin to object to”. (The RSPCA in Britain in the 1940s must have been very different to the current Australian RSPCA, which had quite a lot to say recently about rabbits and other animals being used as live bait to train racing greyhounds.) Patrick also laughs wildly, “clutching his stomach as if it hurt”, when Nicola misunderstands an unfamiliar hawking term.

No wonder his parents are pleased Nicola’s sticking around. “He hasn’t had much opportunity of making friends this last year or so,” says Mr Merrick to Nicola. “We shall always be delighted to see you, as long as you want to come.”

I don’t think it’s just Patrick’s injuries that have stopped him having friends, if he behaves at school the way he behaves at home. Even Nicola thinks he’s being “unreasonable and rather childish” when he argues with his mother, who says it’s impossible for Patrick to bring the hawks to London, so they will have to be released into the wild. She also tells Nicola that the Merricks are buying the Marlows’ London house, so I suppose at least Lawrie will be able to visit her beloved hall-stand in the future.

Patrick does show some concern when Jael claws open Nicola’s shoulder, but probably only because if the grown-ups see, they might stop Nicola from helping with the hawks. And he does give her a book about Nelson’s funeral (as an inducement not to complain about her shoulder?) and she promises to bring him The Boke of Falconerie.

Meanwhile, Peter is coaching Lawrie in swimming and diving, because Lawrie has learned nothing from Autumn Term and “her ambitions were legion” regarding winning all the school and regatta competitions – also, “these holidays, she might achieve a rather spectacular rescue if only someone would be so obliging as to put themselves in danger of drowning”.

It also turns out Peter has actually taken his loaded shotgun to the beach with him. I don’t know anything about British gun culture, but surely that’s not normal? He aims it at a passing seagull, then manages to kill a couple of rabbits on the way home. Then he decides to take the dead rabbits to Patrick for the hawks. Patrick and Nicola aren’t there, but he feeds Jael a rabbit, leaving the door wide open. What if that messes up Jael’s training schedule or allows a hawk to escape? Patrick and Peter become a bit “shy and embarrassed” when they meet, years after they last saw each other, but things improve when Patrick invites Peter for an afternoon’s hawking and suggests he bring his camera. Peter is trying to win a photography competition, the prize being a “cine-camera”. Then Patrick suggests Peter take a photo of the peregrine’s nest on the cliffs.

Peter, looking at Jael, said in a quick, enthusiastic voice, “That’s a good idea.”
[…]
Nicola looked across at Lawrie … and Lawrie lifted her shoulders to her ears and spread her hands a little, being Mademoiselle Renier being bouleversée by such stupidity. And of course she was right: if Peter wouldn’t say himself he couldn’t stand heights, no one else could say it for him.

Oh, Peter. He’s so caught up in demonstrating how brave he is, that he hasn’t realised it’s braver to admit when you can’t do something.

Chapter VI: The Day It Rained

Nicola gives Patrick The Boke of Falconerie and Jael is becoming a skilled hunter. She chases a hare off into the woods and Nicola gets spooked in there:

The sunlight, striking down between the thin tree-trunks, had a tarnished look. In the undergrowth, still sodden and strong-smelling from the night’s rain, a million insects buzzed and hovered. There was nothing else. Unless you counted the unseen presence which watched and listened and moved as you moved.

“Yes, well,” said Nicola, not aloud, above the sudden thudding of her heart. For there wasn’t anything there. It was only the thing that happened in woods…

Afterwards, Patrick is able to admit he was “absolutely panic-stricken” for a moment, but Nicola can’t do the same because “when you were thirteen and a girl, you had to be more careful.” Which is true – plus, she’s a Marlow, therefore not allowed to show any weakness.

Then there’s a nice long scene with the siblings exploring the old attic at Trennels and deciding what they’ll do at the Colebridge Festival. Peter is entering for diving, swimming and dinghy sailing; Karen is entering the food section with “One Bowl of Salad Ready to Serve”; Rowan’s doing show-jumping on her pony; Lawrie’s doing swimming, diving, high jump and elocution; Ann’s in the piano competition; and Nicola hopes to win some money for keeping her hawk by entering singing, sports and pony events. Ginty wants to maintain her pose of being “different and aloof and sensitive like Unity said” and tries to get out of entering, but gets bossed into swimming and diving by Rowan. Also, their father is umpiring the sailing, and Patrick has done one nice thing by saying Rowan can practice with his jumps, even though they’re competing against each other.

But then their mother comes in, bearing news. Miss Keith says Nicola can keep a hawk at school for a term! And the Kingscote uniform is changing back to its pre-war style, which means great expense for the five sisters, which prompts Rowan to make an announcement. She will leave school and manage the farm! It’s not as though she has any great career plans, having realised she doesn’t have the artistic skills to be an architect:

“Save Daddy coming out of the Service. Save Giles having a conscience. Save me having to think what I want to do in my future life. […] What’s the point of my staying two years in the Sixth, and p’raps being finished afterwards? It’s all so I can get a reasonable job. And here is a reasonable job. So what?”

Nicola thinks this is a good idea, because Rowan is a “terrifically bossy type” who “really can run things”, but their mother is unconvinced. She says Captain Marlow won’t agree, except of course he will – this way he gets to have Trennels and his Navy career. Poor Rowan! She doesn’t sound enthusiastic about this at all. She’s sacrificing herself for her father. Even if she doesn’t know yet what she wants to do with her life, even if Peter can eventually take over the farm – surely it will limit her future options to leave school at seventeen.

The other thing that happens is that Nicola tries out her competition song, a very sad song about death, which makes Mrs Marlow rush off in tears because it reminds her of Jon. Which makes me wonder if she stayed at Trennels as a young woman and met both Jon and her future husband at the same time, and even though she ended up with Captain Marlow and eight children, maybe she really preferred Jon, who does seem to have been much nicer. (Don’t tell me, there’s fanfic about that, isn’t there?)

Next, Chapter VII: Jael in the Evening