{"id":5224,"date":"2017-04-07T12:48:13","date_gmt":"2017-04-07T02:48:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/?p=5224"},"modified":"2017-04-07T12:48:13","modified_gmt":"2017-04-07T02:48:13","slug":"the-marlows-and-the-traitor-part-four","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/2017\/04\/the-marlows-and-the-traitor-part-four\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The Marlows and the Traitor\u2019, Part Four"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thursday Afternoon (1): Lawrie Runs for It<\/strong><\/p>\n

This book may be an action-packed thriller, but there\u2019s still room for some droll humour. In this chapter, it\u2019s revealed that Lawrie\u2019s grand escape is actually the result of her accidentally tripping over while daydreaming, falling into a hollow and getting separated from the others by the thick fog. I also liked film-obsessed Lawrie\u2019s reaction to the initial appearance of Foley:<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026to meet a man with a gun in an empty house seemed to Lawrie a perfectly possible thing to happen. Really, when you remembered the number of times it happened in films, it was only surprising that it hadn\u2019t happened sooner. She was, she found to her annoyance, a bit scared, because even though spies and gangsters always came to a sticky end in the last reel, the innocent people quite often came to stickier ends before that. All the same, in spite of being scared, Lawrie, in an odd way, was rather enjoying herself. She kept thinking: \u2018This is how it feels\u2013this is how my feet go\u2013when I\u2019m in films I must remember this.\u2019\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I am rather disturbed to find myself having something in common with Lawrie, because this is exactly<\/em> how I\u2019ve reacted to crises in the past, except my thoughts tend to run along the lines of \u2018I must remember this for when I write a scene like this in a novel.\u2019 <\/p>\n

In a rare burst of common sense, Lawrie restrains herself from running after the others and instead waits till they\u2019re safely out of earshot, then climbs over a wall (unfortunately landing in a tangle of nettles and brambles). She also remembers to check whether the others are somewhere on the foreshore, perhaps bound and gagged, before going for help. But that is the end of her level-headedness. She stumbles back to Farthing Fee, convinced by her overactive imagination that someone is following her and that even when she reaches the hotel, she won\u2019t be safe:<\/p>\n

\u201cYou couldn\u2019t tell, when it was a matter of spies and gangsters, who mightn\u2019t be in league with the enemy. Suppose the hotel manager was? Suppose by now Foley had got in touch with him through his secret transmitter? Suppose they were waiting for her when she got in and pretended to let her telephone and then drugged her or something? Lawrie had seen plenty of films where that sort of thing happened and she wasn\u2019t going to be caught like that.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What she is<\/em> caught by is the conductor on the bus, because she hasn\u2019t brought any money with her, even though the children were planning to catch the bus back from Farthing Fee after their visit to Mariners \u2013 presumably Lawrie always expects Nicola or one of the others to pay her fare. The situation is not helped by an interfering passenger who is \u201cfat\u201d and wears \u201ctoo much lipstick\u201d (Antonia Forest really does have issues with women who wear colourful clothes or make-up). Laurie tries to explain she\u2019ll pay later, gives her name and explains she\u2019s staying at the Majestic Hotel, and is bewildered when the others don\u2019t believe her:<\/p>\n

\u201cBut if she could have seen herself\u2013scratched, grubby, her shorts and cardigan torn, her jersey stained green\u2013she wouldn\u2019t have wondered. She didn\u2019t look in the least like the sort of child whose parents might be staying at the Majestic.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mind you, even though she looks grubby, I presume her clothes are expensive, her accent is upper-middle-class and her sense of entitlement is pure Marlow, so I\u2019m not entirely convinced by the adults\u2019 reactions in this scene. It doesn\u2019t really matter, anyway, because Lawrie wrenches away, dashes off across the road and is immediately knocked unconscious by a car. Robert Anquetil turns up as the ambulance arrives and confirms that she is<\/em> a Marlow staying at the Majestic \u2013 except he thinks she\u2019s Nicola. Interestingly, this is the first time anyone\u2019s ever confused the twins. Even at school, where they wear the same clothes, no one ever seems to get them mixed up. They do have very different personalities and mannerisms, though, so it\u2019s not surprising that Robert wouldn\u2019t be able to distinguish unconscious Lawrie from Nicola, especially if he doesn\u2019t even know Nicola has a twin.<\/p>\n

Thursday Night (1): Midnight Conference<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is a very exciting chapter, full of big revelations. Robert Anquetil works for Naval Intelligence! He\u2019s just been pretending<\/em> to be a fisherman! Except now he\u2019s pretending that he\u2019s a plain-clothes policeman to poor Mrs Marlow, who\u2019s just arrived at the hospital to find one of her children having emergency surgery and three others missing, possibly dead. Well, that\u2019s what happens when you leave Ginty in charge. Mrs Marlow does explain the injured child is probably Lawrie because \u201cLawrie would be more likely to forget her bus fare.\u201d Okay, I did laugh out loud at that, despite the seriousness of the situation.<\/p>\n

Robert has summoned his boss, Commander Whittier, to the police station, where they discuss the situation. Robert has already searched Mariners and found a scrap of code that was left behind, but no Foley or Talisman<\/em>. Robert then helpfully explains the background of the case to Whittier (and us), even though Whittier\u2019s read the file. A year ago, the British Navy discovered that a clerk called Ida Cross was stealing naval secrets and sending them out of the country. Meanwhile, some U-boats (that is, German submarines) had been spotted near the coast and a Baltic agent reported that some Nazis wanted for war crimes were being forced to carry information (presumably by the Soviet Union, but this isn\u2019t explicitly stated). It\u2019s also thought that these Nazi agents are using U-boats to travel to Britain.<\/p>\n

Still, the Navy couldn\u2019t work out how Ida Cross was handing over the secrets to the Nazis. But the intelligence people discovered the U-boats were hanging out near the St-Annes villages, Robert Anquetil\u2019s boyhood home. So he moved home and pretended to be a fisherman, until finally he happened to spot Ida Cross making her way to Mariners. And then he realised \u2013 Ida was passing the secrets to Lewis Foley, who used the Talisman<\/em> to meet with the U-boats and hand over the secrets.<\/p>\n

Before I get onto further revelations about Foley, I have a number of questions. The author\u2019s note states this book is set in the late 1940s and it was first published in 1953. So \u2013 why Nazis? Robert says the Nazis, who were \u201cSS men, three guards from various concentration camps [and] a number of minor Party officials [\u2026] had been given their lives on condition they acted as go-betweens\u201d. Would Russians who\u2019d experienced the horrors of the Battle of Stalingrad actually allow Nazis to live, let alone trust them to carry secrets from the West? Would Nazis really become spies for their sworn enemies, the Communists? Given that Western powers would be more likely to show leniency than the Soviets, why wouldn\u2019t the Nazis pretend they were picking up secrets, then go to the British authorities and offer to tell all they knew in return for immunity from prosecution? Why is there no mention of Britain\u2019s actual Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union? Now it\u2019s true that there were Germans who spied for the Soviet Union during this period (for instance, Klaus Fuchs<\/a>) but these were people who were life-long Communists and fervent anti-Nazis, who\u2019d worked for the Allies during the war. <\/p>\n

I find it hard to believe that Antonia Forest was fervently pro-Communist and therefore wanted to avoid casting the Soviets as the bad guys. So why complicate things with this implausible post-war Nazis-as-bad-guys plot? Maybe she thought her child readers were so used to equating \u2018Nazi\u2019 with \u2018enemy\u2019 that they\u2019d get confused by non-Nazi enemies? Maybe she just wanted to use U-boats in her story? Possibly I\u2019m missing something obvious here. However, I was<\/em> impressed to see her description of the Portland Spy Ring eight years before it was actually uncovered. Ida Cross, the \u201cplain creature\u201d who uses her job as a clerk to steal secrets, bears a remarkable resemblance to Ethel Gee<\/a>, the \u201cspinster\u201d filing clerk who stole secrets to pass on to a Russian agent and was arrested and sent to prison in 1961. <\/p>\n

Robert also discusses Foley, who<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026has no loyalties, only enmities. I don\u2019t think for a moment he\u2019s an ardent Communist. I think he\u2019s only in it, because he gets a peculiar kick out of being on his own against the rest of us. He always did.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Foley\u2019s sounding a bit like Guy Burgess<\/a>, a contrarian from a \u2018good\u2019 naval family who worked for the Foreign Office until 1951, when they realised he was a Soviet agent and he fled to the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a bit more discussion about whether Foley is likely to have killed the children in cold blood. Robert thinks this is unlikely, although Foley has \u201ca shocking temper for about thirty seconds at a time\u201d. It\u2019s also unlikely Foley has handed them over to the enemy, because how could he have had time to arrange a rendezvous with the U-boat? The Marlows were an unexpected complication for him.<\/p>\n

But then, dramatic news! The coastguard has found bits of wreckage of the Talisman<\/em>!<\/p>\n

Next, Thursday Afternoon (2): Shipwreck<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thursday Afternoon (1): Lawrie Runs for It This book may be an action-packed thriller, but there\u2019s still room for some droll humour. In this chapter, it\u2019s revealed that Lawrie\u2019s grand escape is actually the result of her accidentally tripping over while daydreaming, falling into a hollow and getting separated from the others by the thick … Continue reading \u2018The Marlows and the Traitor\u2019, Part Four<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-5224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-antonia-forest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5224"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5224\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5226,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5224\/revisions\/5226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}