Doing the Right Thing

How many children’s books have characters that not only discuss literature but also give you a reading list? That is just one of the things that put Antonia Forest’s novels at the top of mine. Her wonderful sequence of thirteen books, written between 1948 and 1982, follows the fortunes of the Marlow family – eight children, naval commander father, upper-middle class stock going back to Tudor times –in vivid episodes, centred now on the girls’ boarding school, Kingscote, now on the family farm, Trennels, now on London, more specifically Hampstead. They were the first books to make me feel that my preoccupations and dreaminess, which marked me out as peculiar at school, were part of growing up – that I was not alone.

Reading my first Marlow book, Falconer’s Lure, a few years after its publication in 1957, I was amazed to find that the protagonist lived in Hampstead. I lived in Hampstead! And that Nicola, the brave, truthful, sensitive, intelligent heroine, liked Hampstead more than any other place in the world. So did I! And she loved reading. So did I! And her family talked about books. So did mine! And she fell in love with boys but couldn’t talk about it . . . You get the picture. I must have been 12 or 13 – Nicola’s age – when I was entranced to discover that somewhere in the world were other girls who not only loved books but could also escape into other worlds without magic, just by throwing themselves into experiences. I had only just, reluctantly, given up hope of one day stepping into a painting and sailing away, like Prince Caspian in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader or Kay in The Box of Delights; at the same time, I was sneaking reads of my mother’s copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover when she went out. There hadn’t seemed to be any books for people like me; in fact, I didn’t really believe there were any people like me. In Falconer’s Lure Nicola meets Patrick, the boy next door. Down on the family farm for the summer, the Marlow family are shocked to find themselves inheriting the property when their cousin Jon suddenly dies. For Nicola, the loss of Hampstead is eased when Patrick involves her in the care of the hawks which he had shared with Jon. Into a complicated narrative featuring lost hawks, a scary incident on a cliff, an overnight spell in a haystack, an elocution competition and whether girls can farm (yes) are woven the author’s fascination with medieval chivalry, sailing, horse-racing, the lore of hawking, Shakespearean insults, poetry and the meaning of courage. The book was an education in itself. ‘The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon!’ sticks in my mind not from Macbeth but from Falconer’s Lure. Amazingly, Antonia Forest not only grew up in Hampstead, she also went to the same girls’ day school as I did. To judge from her books, the teachers hadn’t changed much over the intervening decades. In The Cricket Term, fierce Miss Cromwell (motto: ‘There will be blood for breakfast’) not only suggests that young Nicola read Scott and Dickens but describes these as ‘bread-and-butter reading’ – much like our English teacher. Literature as the stuff of sanity is prescribed in response to Nicola’s having smuggled in a book on the ‘Limited List’ – Mary Renault’s The Mask of Alexander, which was another of my own teen favourites, an evocation of male homosexual love by a famous lesbian writer, cloaked in well-researched ancient history and Greek drama. Asked why the book might be ‘limited’, Nicola replies, ‘Because Nico liked men better than women, do you mean? Or p’raps Miss Keith thought the battles were a touch gruesome? I do see it could throw the Thirds a bit if they got hold of it.’ My own mother had a similar insouciance about fictional sex and violence. It was harder for a modern Jew like myself to grasp fully Antonia Forest’s crush on Catholicism. End of Term (1959) features a Christmas play and carols. At school, we Jewish girls could never take part in Christmas, much to my personal chagrin. I remember arguing fiercely with my father when he intervened to remove me from Christian prayers in the Hall (we had our own, in the gym). ‘But I like carols,’ I argued, aged 6. ‘We don’t believe in Jesus,’ he explained. I didn’t see what that had to do with it. No more did Miranda West, Nicola’s best friend, the ‘Jewess with the lovely vivid face and nose like a hawk’s’, when she agreed to sing in the nativity play in the cathedral. So far, I did understand: the soaring roofs, the candlelight, the catchy choruses. But icons and prie-dieux as evidenced by Nicola’s French grandmother (Autumn Term, 1948), Patrick’s insistence on the Latin mass, confession and venial or mortal sin – ‘grave matter, full knowledge, full consent’ as Miss Cromwell ironically describes Nicola’s book-smuggling – they were as exotic to me as medieval hawking. I lapped it up and can still hold my own in conversations with Roman Catholics, thanks to Patrick Merrick’s struggles with Vatican Two. In real life, Antonia Forest, born Patricia Rubinstein, was half- Jewish but converted to Catholicism at the age of 30. According to the excellent introductions to the Girls Gone By editions of her books, she loved not just the spiritual elevation of her new creed but also its exact prescriptions of behaviour, ritual and ethics: the very qualities which it shares with Judaism. But Christianity offers more: cosmic drama, suffering, temptation, struggle, redemption. Each of her novels follows a Bunyanesque path through the travails of this world, satisfyingly embodied in twentieth-century dilemmas like whether to accept clothes sold from a charity shop which acts as a front for a drugs ring (Attic Term, 1976) or whether to blow the whistle on a cheating Guide leader (Autumn Term). Doing the right thing is never, Nicola and the reader ruefully discover, easy. Temptation frequently assails Lawrie, Nicola’s twin, a drama queen avant la lettre who has her heart set on being an actress. Lawrie, to whom is attributed Forest’s passion for the theatre, is Nicola’s shadow self, always ready to jettison a good deed for a good part. Yet as an artist – performing as a shepherd boy in a nativity play or as the beggar in The Prince and the Pauper – she is wiser than herself. And here was my first introduction to those fascinating, annoying monstres sacrés, theatre people. Forest’s only two historical books, The Player’s Boy (1970) and The Players and the Rebels (1971), follow Tudor ancestors of the Marlows through the birth of modern theatre and the Essex rebellion against Elizabeth I, with ‘Will’ (you know who) playing a strong supporting role. They are the least satisfying of the novels: Forest’s Catholicism blinded her to the political realities of the time and her need for symmetry in the story created cross-class friendships which could never have happened and do not ring true. But to be on stage with Shakespeare . . . Most intoxicating of all, Peter’s Room (1961) opened up a community of the imagination. In this story, surely one of the most unusual ever to be published as a children’s book, Peter, naval cadet and older brother to Nicola, makes his den in the room above an old barn. It feels spooky, with old family papers in a chest and a stuffed owl. The locals mutter darkly. Still, one winter holiday, the younger Marlows and their neighbour Patrick use it as a base. Kept indoors by snow they begin a pretence play, based on the fantasy kingdoms of Gondal and Angria created by the Brontë family. And, just as happened with the young Brontës, the story runs away with them, particularly the beautiful Ginty Marlow and Patrick, whose real-life flirtation, toNicola’s distress, is subsumed in the romantic intrigue and betrayal of ‘old unhappy far-off things and battles long ago’. Forest’s depiction of emergent sexuality and jealousy is as matter-of-fact as her comments on Renault’s Mask of Alexander. What particularly exercised the teenage me – and the teenage Nicola – was her dictum, through the mouth of swotty older sister Karen, that continuing pretend games into adulthood is ‘an appalling waste of time and talent’, that the Brontës’ self-absorption was ‘pathetic’ andthat an imaginary world that drains energy from the real one is dangerous. Of course, as a reader you can have your cake and eat it, too. When, as over the years I intermittently do, I immerse myself in Peter’s Room, I recharge all my batteries: the wild romance of fantasy love, a bracing bath in middle-class values (Karen is revising Thucydides for her Oxford entrance exam when she lays down the law; later, the large family eat home-made apple pie before trying on dresses for a dance), a crash course in nineteenth-century literature, and resolution of a lived experience of a stage in Nicola’s – or my – self-realization. Yet Peter’s Room is out of print (second-hand copies run to nearly £100). At the drop of a hat, or a fall in spirits, I’m still prone to immersion in imaginary worlds. I keep trying to grow up, but as Nicola remarks, it is surprisingly difficult. She wants to be like Nelson –but I’d settle for being like her: off to help with the lambing when Patrick rides away with Ginty.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 21 © Victoria Neumark 2009