{"id":5513,"date":"2017-12-28T22:39:07","date_gmt":"2017-12-28T11:39:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/?p=5513"},"modified":"2018-01-01T23:30:52","modified_gmt":"2018-01-01T12:30:52","slug":"end-of-term-part-three","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/2017\/12\/end-of-term-part-three\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018End of Term\u2019, Part Three"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chapter Four: Altogether Unexpected<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is a short but dramatic chapter in which Lois proves to be even more odious than usual. It begins with Miss Craven, Miss Redmond and Lois having a meeting to decide who should be in the Junior netball team. Lois finds some of the tasks of Games Captain tedious but she\u2019s enjoying hanging out with the staff and lording it over younger pupils. Miss Craven assumes Nicola will be Captain and Centre, but Miss Redmond makes a tart remark about Nicola\u2019s self-confidence. Because heavens above, we can\u2019t have a Kingscote girl with self-confidence<\/em>! This is Lois\u2019s chance to contribute her opinion of Nicola:<\/p>\n

\u201cThat conversation, overheard and rearranged \u2013 was she going to repeat it? She didn\u2019t want to, yet she felt helplessly that she almost certainly would \u2026\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Not only does Lois give in to temptation and repeat her mostly-fictional story about Nicola, she tells an outright lie by saying Nicola\u2019s \u201cturned up late to practices\u201d, plural<\/em>. Still, it\u2019s not just Lois \u2013 Miss Redmond is just as petty, taking her revenge for Nicola turning down her Guides offer: \u201cWhat that young woman needs, it seems to me, is a really good jolt.\u201d<\/p>\n

Miss Craven, who\u2019s also told that Nicola has enough to do already with the Christmas play and her hawk, goes along with it. It\u2019s not really Miss Craven\u2019s fault \u2013 she\u2019s been fed misinformation by Lois and Miss Redmond. <\/p>\n

Oh, the other thing is that the three of them put hopeless Marie in the team, not because she can play, but because Miss Keith is concerned that Marie is struggling at school and needs a boost of confidence. So, Kingscote girls do<\/em> need to have self-confidence, just a very specific and limited amount of it. Except I don\u2019t see how putting Marie in a team where she\u2019s going to fail will make her any more popular with the other girls or help her self-confidence. <\/p>\n

Poor Nicola finds she\u2019s been left off the team before everyone else, then has to pretend not to mind about it all through breakfast. There\u2019s a small distraction when she\u2019s offered a chance to buy a new pony and the others discuss this. It turns out Miranda not only rides in the holidays, but also skates and fences (\u201cMummy likes me to have millions of things to do to keep me out from under her feet when she\u2019s got refugee committees\u201d). But then Lawrie, Tim and the others find out about Nicola and are outraged. As Miranda says, \u201cIt\u2019s just so \u2013 so \u2013 so unjust<\/em> when they do things like this and no one knows what or why or anything<\/em>.\u201d Janice Scott tactfully changes the subject when she sees Nicola on the verge of tears, then later consoles her: \u201cThey do these things from time to time, you know. And there\u2019s rarely any rational explanation.\u201d<\/p>\n

I think Nicola may have joined Miranda\u2019s Janice Admiration Society, which seems completely reasonable to me. Apart from being a kind and thoughtful person, Janice is also beautiful, like a \u201cDresden figurine\u201d, all \u201cglassy, cool, translucent\u201d. Janice is eminently crush-worthy.<\/p>\n

The rest of the netball team tries and fails to convince Miss Craven to put Nicola in the team. Jenny Cardigan (who has the best name ever for an English schoolgirl), even proposes they go on strike:<\/p>\n

\u201cJust for a moment, the possibility of behaving as if they were characters in a book called, perhaps, ‘That Term at St Faith\u2019s’ seemed not only fabulous, but plausible.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I know End of Term<\/em>, despite having the form of a conventional girls\u2019 boarding school book, isn\u2019t really like most of those books, but this struck the wrong note to me \u2013 as if Antonia Forest needed to remind us, in rather snobby way, how trashy those<\/em> books are and how superior her<\/em> writing is. Her characters often do talk about what \u201cpeople in books\u201d do and that usually comes across as amusing and astute, but this threw me out of the story for a moment.<\/p>\n

Anyway, obviously the girls don\u2019t go on strike (but Miranda does snub Lois when Lois congratulates her, calling Lois a \u201chammer-toed, pot-bellied, copper-bottomed heel\u201d once Lois is out of earshot). And the netball team goes on to lose their first two games. Well, that\u2019s what happens when you choose players on the basis of ill-informed character judgments, rather than ball-throwing skills.<\/p>\n

Next, Chapter Five: Half-Term at Trennels<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chapter Four: Altogether Unexpected This is a short but dramatic chapter in which Lois proves to be even more odious than usual. It begins with Miss Craven, Miss Redmond and Lois having a meeting to decide who should be in the Junior netball team. Lois finds some of the tasks of Games Captain tedious but … Continue reading \u2018End of Term\u2019, Part Three<\/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":[22,6,18],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-5513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1950s-and-1960s","category-books","category-my-favourite-books","tag-antonia-forest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5513","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=5513"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5513\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5518,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5513\/revisions\/5518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}