Readthrough: Cricket Term chapters 1-3

[coughingbear]

Welcome to the readthrough of Cricket Term, and many thanks to lilliburlero both for running this whole thing and giving me the chance to write about this book. It was the first Antonia Forest I ever read, found in a jumble sale when I was about ten, and I loved it immediately. At the Forest memorial day, I think Hilary Clare suggested that there may be too many references to books beforehand, but I remember liking that sense of jumping into the middle of life and story. And in many ways I think it’s one of the most joyous of Forest’s books.

First published 1974.

(Post edited to try and fix some formatting infelicities.)

Chapter 1: Home—
Prone across her unmade bed…’ Lawrie being herself and plunging us straight back into the story; Ann’s character established instantly and Nicola’s despising of it. As noted a few paragraphs later, it's eight days since the end of Ready-Made Family, but Lawrie has not forgotten or forgiven over the Idiot Boy. Interesting that Peter is feeling guilty enough to give her a transistor radio. ‘Swops or vengeance’ – the Marlow rules around such things emerge in patches. I wonder what Lawrie’s vengeances have been so far?

And now Ramage and The Mask of Apollo. I am sure I’m not the only person here who started reading Mary Renault entirely because of this reference, and this remains a favourite. Coincidentally they are starting a readthrough of it today over at renaultx. One obvious shared theme is the power of the theatre - other thoughts? I'm also looking forward to discussing Nicola's responses to it when she talks to Cromwell.

On Lawrie’s desire to play Caliban not Ariel, while she is very annoying about it, I do think part of the problem here is caused by Kempe. Surely it’s actually a bit silly of her to cast Lawrie without any audition, especially when the songs are important to the part? (I remain unconvinced that any of the suggested solutions to getting Nicola on and off to sing would really work.) I also wonder if Lawrie would have taken more to the part if it hadn’t been guaranteed to her so she’d had to think about how she would audition for it.

Ginty and Patrick still going on in the background and Nicola resolutely turning her mind away from it.

Nicola running across ‘the wild bit’ of the garden – if Mrs Marlow is letting it run wilder, I wonder who was doing the gardening before? I can’t quite see Jon having time for it.

As indicated at the end of RMF, Dodds and Marlows have definitely had enough of one another for the moment.

‘They were dead lucky not to be found under the leaves like that other child’ (Rowan). So it seems that Uncle Gerry probably has been charged with the ‘something up north’ he was wanted for.

I do love Nicola’s internal monologues. ‘prob, it’d just be Kay in a mad wifely rush’. And am amused that family life has enable to her to reply ‘palimpsest’ immediately when Chas demands a word. Kay and Rose cooking together does indeed seem highly domestic. And it’s a relief to hear Kay speaking cheerfully. ‘So unenterprising. And so sweet-- ‘ does sound like her.

Orange-juice-and-cream – anyone like it? I tried it once after reading this and wasn’t very taken.

‘if Mr Tranter ever comes out of hospital’ sounds almost as though they might give the house up if he did. Wonder what if anything Geoff Marlow has had to say about it all yet. Nicola clearly spent enough time at the farmhouse to remember what the photos were, and Kay’s response to her sadness is a bit wilful misunderstanding. Nicola, rightly, hasn’t forgotten how things were, though.
Another clue to Karen’s state of mind in giving up her degree, since archaeology mostly isn’t ‘choice bits of ancient Greek statuary’?

Brother is a very charged word.

Rose seems to be getting on all right with Karen, but would still rather trust Nicola’s word over the school. They had better hope the line to Colebridge isn’t cut after all, if they’re depending on it for school trains. Karen once again making what she wants happen. I am still left confused as to why this is what she wants, but she was one of the siblings who was happy to be staying on at Trennels after Jon died, I think. I enjoy Nicola dropping her in it over the Last Dinner.


Chapter Two ‘Interval'

The letter from Edwin about Nicholas Marlow - Players Boy and Players and the Rebels were published in 1970 and 1971, between RMF and Cricket Term. It was years after I read Cricket Term that I finally got hold of them and was able to read Nicholas’s story, but like Nicola I always wanted to know. I like the way Forest doesn't give too many details, and interjects Nicola’s reactions into the story, and the pure joy of discovering Ark Royal. Even the realisation that she can’t share it with Patrick doesn’t damp her reactions.

Though emotion, even happy emotion, must still be clamped down in the presence of others. I like Rowan’s apology for interrupting.

Rowan’s advice sets up the situation with Lois Sanger, the ancient enemy. And her cricketing comments are very sound – I may have commented that fielding ‘needn’t be beneath Lower IV.A’ when following England on occasion. Nicola has the sense to take her advice, despite wanting a Wimsey-style late cut. (Btw, if anyone is looking for some explanations of cricket terms, Simon Hughes has quite a helpful list here and there's a guide to fielding positions on the BBC website here - mid on is just the equivalent of mid off on the opposite side of the field.)

More set-up with the references to Wimsey and Tallboys in Murder Must Advertise.

‘Fifty against the Australians. Every time.’ Me too. Though these days it would have to be a century.

Finally getting ready to leave for school, and one of the occasional similarities between Ann and Ginty comes out. Lawrie is merely concerned that no one – her mother? Rowan? Mrs Bertie? – uses her radio while she’s gone. And a lovely, typically Forest chapter ending.

Chapter 3 —And Away

Esther and Daks reunited. A reminder of how much their friendship depends on Nicola’s admiration of Esther’s looks.

Ginty being annoying, and a flashback to what she and Patrick have been doing these holidays, using Shakespeare. ‘Still webbed in thoughts of Patrick’ – gorgeous phrase, and then the shift to term-time Ginty, which she only half-recognises going on in herself. Ann is unexpectedly (to Nicola) perceptive about this, and then immediately they are rubbing each other up the wrong way again. There are quite a few times when Nicola's opinion of Ann ought to get a bit more permanently jolted, I think, but family likings are not to be commanded.

Tim Keith put out over her lost day and Lawrie’s bleeping about Caliban – which since Tim’s mentioned it to Me Auntie suggests long letters about the unfairness of life arriving from Lawrie during the holidays. And for once Nicola gets the chance to crush Tim in conversation. Tim is looking to be a bit left out this term, what with The Play and cricket being the main things on offer. Nicola and Tim’s relationship seems to have settled down into something that’s not quite friendship but a more comfortable neutrality.
Lawrie glooming before the Play List – such a characteristic image.

Miranda – unlike Ginty – taking a while to become her school self, and as always I’m charmed by the fire escape and the roof, a world away from everyone else. Miranda’s curiosity always part of her, this time about Marie Dobson, and about Karen’s wedding, which Nicola does feel able to satisfy. I wonder what she left out of the edited account? Edwin hitting Peter? Exactly what might have happened in Oxford?
By the end of these three chapters Forest has managed to get in pretty much all the backstory we need to understand what happens later – Lois, Marie, the Christmas Play, the netball match… Not all the details, which would be implausible, but very realistic conversations about recent events.

Nicola rather enjoys her grime sheet, and Miranda thinks Crommie should be too grown up to care about the Form Shield –reminding Nicola of the conversation with her mother in RMF, which clearly did make an impression.

And Jan Scott introduced, leading into Miranda’s interpretation of the Tempest – which I don’t feel expert enough to comment on, tbh, but hope others may have things to say about it, in this and later chapters. And how suitable is it as a school play?

The image of Jan as a small boy in a green jerkin, and Miranda’s fidelity, which is quite moving, even though her last sentence reminds us how much she makes – or thinks she makes – conscious decisions about where to bestow her affections.

Looking forward to seeing what everyone has to say!

Comments

[antfan.livejournal.com]

Happy New Year all. What a lovely summary.

Cricket Term is perhaps my favourite, and certainly most re-read, Forest - so much the most "summery" of the school books, or "joyous" as you say. Or to put it another way, Nicola isn't being constantly shamed and humiliated as with the earlier school books.

I also think that CT draw a lot of strength from the way it wraps up so many longstanding story lines in generally very satisfying ways. Even in these first chapters, we are seeing the "conclusion" in a sense of RMF and the Player books. I think there's a shift though in that earlier books - eg Thuggery - seemed to very carefully introduce the back story (in Thuggery's case, through Lawrie's imagined newspaper story) whereas CT seems to basically assume that the reader will have read the earlier books, and certainly isn't going out of its way to explain anything. Which is fine with me.

Some other things that strike me: I think the passage with Karen does make me feel even more that Edwin, in a way, has been the victim in RMF, despite appearances at the start of the book. That Karen is and has been the one to call the shots. And what I really don't get, far more than the fact that she married Edwin in the first place (because lurve is always a bit inexplicable, right? and anyway he's got his good sides it turns out) is that she wants to settle in Westbridge/Trennels permanently. I mean who are they going to socialise with? I can't see them fitting in with the hunting/fishing/gentry types, nor Karen with village mums: sounds a very peculiar thing to do. After all, she's not even speaking to Rowan.

And Nicola's conversation with Tim intrigues me - is Tim seriously asking Nicola to be her best friend? What on earth would Lawrie (or Miranda) feel about that? Is she joking or just being treacherous and now bored-with-Lawrie? (Tim is generally a lot less cruel in CT than in previous books though - which again I think contributes to the much more cheerful tone of the whole thing.)

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

I think you're right, btw; Karen is a sharp-elbowed, upper-middle-class steam-roller; poor Guardian-reading Edwin never had a chance*.



*But you still don't hit people with riding crops. Not in the face, and not outside the bedroom, anyway.

[coughingbear]

I've always read Tim's question as a tease - after all, it was she who dropped Nicola originally.

And it reminds me how that the suppression of emotion is a thing Nicola's learnt from being around people like Tim, as well as from her family.

Karen and Edwin

[scarletlobster.livejournal.com]

However domesticated Karen becomes, I can never for an instant feel optimistic about Karen and Edwin's marriage. Karen will surely realize pretty soon that her life has become unbelievably lonely and dull - imagine her and Fob together all day every day when the others are at school - and we know what a temper Edwin has got. I imagine Edwin spending longer and longer hours at work, while Karen takes Fob to Trennels in desperation for some adult company, and drives her mother to distraction.

Orange juice and cream

[sprog-63.livejournal.com]

I have never admitted this to anyone before but ...

I tried it too, also following reading Cricket Term. I quite liked it. (I realise this must be true, because over the past 40 years I have experimented with different proportions and different types of cream. In case anyone is interested, I'll pass on that to my taste it is least successful with clotted cream!)

[sarah barnard (from livejournal.com)]

It's my favourite as well....and one of the factors that changed my life, by making me aware girls could play cricket. Eventually I took it up in my early 20s and that how I met my husband

Last Dinner

[buntyandjinx.livejournal.com]

I was (still am) very taken by the Last Dinner concept - with N's turn for trimmings and choosing Matchmakers, the height of sophistication in 1974. Which reminds me Cricket Term is, imo, the last Marlow novel which sits comfortably within its period - The Attic Term feels to me as if AF didn't really understand the era she's writing about and is trying too hard to be hip.

And what is Jelly Soup? The mind boggles.

Re: Last Dinner

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

I assume Jelly Soup is jellied consomme.

Re: Last Dinner

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

I agree that CT is the last book to feel comfortable within its period without grating details. I think that is partly because the story is so self-contained. A couple of chapters at home getting ready to come back to school and then the whole of the rest of the book is set within the school world, without even a half-term to disrupt it. And its such a consistent world which completely obeys its own rules, that the reader is immersed within it. That said, it's a slightly odd world - where everyone takes it totally for granted that a girls' school plays cricket, where teenagers choose to eat something called jelly soup and where Lawrie listens not to pop or rock music but to 'guitars and timpani'. When I first read this, at about Lawrie's age, I didn't know what the word timpani meant (I knew nothing about music) and I used to wonder what strange music Lawrie was listening to played on such an exotic sounding instrument.

50 Against the Australians

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

I agree it'd have to be a century; I suppose as the Cricket Term was published during the ascendancy of Lillee, Thompson and the Chappell brothers even fifty looked like a dream of hopeless optimism, though.

I absolutely love the cricket and I'm glad it's introduced so early.

Re: 50 Against the Australians

[coughingbear]

It seems a little unenterprising, even so.

I love that Nicola is so clear about wanting to win, and that Rowan takes her completely seriously and offers genuinely useful advice.

Re: 50 Against the Australians

[antfan.livejournal.com]

Umm - anyone else also read CT numerous times, enjoyed all the cricket scenes enormously and yet has never actually bothered to go and find out the rudiments of how cricket works, never mind watch a match?

Feeling rather embarrassed now...shall definitely have to follow coughingbears helful links and "run and find out".

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

Here's a blast from the past! A ticket used as a bookmark has just fallen out of my copy. Bournemouth-Manchester, 2 July 06. Well, I know what I was doing then...

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

Can I just say before I comment on anything in particular, how lovely it is that the Readthrough is back! I was getting distinct withdrawal symptoms over Christmas - goodness knows what I'll do when it's all over!

withdrawal symptoms ...

[sprog-63.livejournal.com]

Indeed - it made the Importance of Elsewhere chapters even more welcome!!!

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

The Tempest, as a choice for a school play, strikes me as bad-to-catastrophic. To give just a few reasons:

--the verse, though not Shakespeare's gnarliest, is no cakewalk;
--there are quite a lot of set-pieces which, whatever level of stylisation you're going for, require quite a precise level of choreography. If you're trying any pyrotechnics for the tempest, the Barmecide banquet and Ariel's appearance as harpy or the masque you're leaving technical hostages to fortune too.
--characterisation of all the main characters is very much open to actors' and directors' interpretations (and nothing I see of Kempe suggests much talent in that line: she saw both Lawrie and Nicola play the Shepherd Boy and it comes as news to her that their stage presences are different? God save us!);
--one of its central themes is ageing and the waning of power (something I doubt an eighteen-year-old, even if she is Jan Scott, is really going to both understand and be able to communicate);
---as Miranda (a pretty astute critic) notes, the resolution is ambiguous and deliberately anti-climactic.

And don't even get me started on the lunacy of the auditions procedure...

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

A good school play really needs lots of small, straightforward but equally important parts, whereas the Tempest strikes me as unsuitable because it has three 'star'parts. I can't see Keith approving of the potential for three of her pupils to stand out so much. Although Prospero, Caliban and Ariel are such complex roles, I can't see schoolgirls - however good they may be at acting - really being able to convey the depths or subtleties of the parts.

[coughingbear]

Thanks! I suppose we should be glad that Kempe abandoned her thoughts of staging it in the sunken garden. There are some references to the staging difficulties later, but it's a bit hard to believe they are all so triumphantly overcome.

On Lawrie playing Ariel, I wonder if Kempe is just desperate to do The Tempest, and then looks for how to use Lawrie in it. From the description of the other auditions, it doesn't sound as though she has a clear idea of the rest of the casting.

And on the lunacy of the auditions procedure, do you mean getting so many of them to learn the full parts? It does seem rather a lot to expect. Unless some of them were doing it for A-level, I suppose, though there's no mention of that.

[thekumquat.livejournal.com]

They did the Tempest at my school. Actually, having seen various abridged versions as well as the stunning Patrick Stewart/Julian Bleach slash-central version, it's not such a bad choice - most schools are unlikely to have more than half a dozen actresses inclined to learn the main parts, and there's scope for including lots of sailors, dryads, unnerving Shapes and chorus, to get more people involved.

Getting Kempe to direct within the restrictions imposed by Keith, however...

[hooloovoo_42]

I bought CT, along with AT and EoT, in 1981 when I was almost 16. As much as I enjoyed them all, this was the one I liked best. Not only for the Peter Wimsey references, but for the cricket. I was most disgusted that, although my parents wrote and asked, I wasn't allowed to play cricket (or do woodwork, metalwork & technical drawing) because I was a girl. My Gran played cricket at school and some upstart second years played for a local ladies team (and eventually one of the Yorkshire junior teams). As 1981 was a pretty good year for England cricket, it was all the more relevant to my reading.

1981 in English cricket

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

There's an understatement for you. When we get on to the crucial scene, if anyone dares say it's unrealistic, there's one word for it. Headingley.

Tim, Miss Keith and aunts

[scarletlobster.livejournal.com]

I would have thought the horror for Tim would be not losing one day's holiday but that her horrible headmistress has been staying in her house - a house that otherwise contains only Tim and her father - for the holidays. Imagine coming down to breakfast and having to sit next to your headmistress, who makes it plain that she finds you ignorant and silly.

AF is not really a fan of extended families, is she? In Peter's Room we saw Patrick afflicted by dreadful aunts. It is hinted that Auntie Molly is a sour person, having missed the chance to get married herself. Miranda grumbles about 'hordes of aunts'. No one except the Marlows ever seems to have a close and friendly brother or sister.

Re: Tim, Miss Keith and aunts

[antfan.livejournal.com]

Doesn't Esther have dreadful aunts too? She has to read aloud to them or something. Or was that granny?

I think it's maybe an aversion to a kind of formal grown-up entertaining that goes on, where children are wheeled out for display, in afternoon tea frocks etc, and the adults all come out with rather repressive, stuffy and irritating-to-teenagers comments.

I also think Forest is not keen on leisured upper class women full stop - the group to which the aunts, presumably, mostly belong. I mean, never mind extended family, her mothers (honourable exception: Mrs Marlow) of this class are invariably ghastly too.

[elktheory.livejournal.com]

I read the school-based books long before I got my hands on the holiday/home books. So initially when I read the scene with Karen and the infant Dodds, I assumed there was a backstory explaining how they had all reached this place of ease, warmth, and affection. It was a bit of a shock to read The Ready-Made Family and discover that Karen has very little contact with the children in that book--virtually none before the wedding (I've always been gobsmacked by Chas' question to Nicola, "The one Daddy's getting married to tomorrow--do you know her?") and very little afterward. And yet just days after the conclusion of RMF, we see this lovely little domestic scene. In a way, it's quite heartrending to think of those children attaching themselves so quickly to any vaguely maternal figure who happens along (first Mrs. Marlow, now Karen).

[nnozomi.livejournal.com]

I'm always interested by Ann's comment to Nicola, which you refer to, quoting Twelfth Night with regard to Ginty. It's a lovely quote (not usually all that much of a Ginty fan, I agree with Nicola that it's a bit too nice for her, except I like chameleons too), but it seems a little out of character for Ann to me. Especially since we've been told only a few pages earlier "But for Ann, and not only because she was older, fiction was fiction... ." I'm inclined to feel that Ann is being put to use here to say something that would be more in character coming from Karen. Or am I not being fair to Ann?

[coughingbear]

I read 'for Ann... fiction was fiction' as meaning that characters don't live in her head the way they do for Nicola (and for many of us; such that 'what would Nicola Marlow do?' is an answerable question) but not that she doesn't enjoy or respond to what she reads. I can see her coming across this in Twelfth Night (possibly an O-level set text?) and applying it to Ginty.

[mainerobin.livejournal.com]

Perhaps this was been discussed earlier on Trennels, but I missed it: who is the Nicola Hassard in the dedication? What was she like that AF named her main protagonist after her? I hope she liked cricket and the navy as much as her namesake.

Having read CT for years and never before RMF, this opening chapter was so much more enlightening than in years gone by. I always wondered exactly who that other girl under the bush had been and what that had to do with Nick and Rose? And what had happened with The Idiot Boy? And how had they met anyway, and how had Karen gotten married in the 3 months since EOT?! Now that I know these children I am enchanted by Fob’s surliness, palimpsest and Chas’ thesaurus, and Rose and Karen cooking together. I’m fed up with Lawrie’s cries for Caliban and Ann doing too much for everyone.

Have not read either Ramage or Mask of Apollo. Appreciate the conversation between her and Ann about the Limited label on the book. And later with Crommie. Also appreciate Nick’s open willingness to ignore “it’s just a rule” in order to finish her books.

Nick’s whoop in the pasture as she learns about the ARK ROYAL is one of my favorite moments in these books. I have always wanted a seafaring ancestor, and appreciate her joy in discovering one. Also love the cricket conversation with N and Rowan just afterwards. All these moments between N and R give much insight into who Rowan is. Pretty much the only insights we get. The more I learn about Rowan, the more I like her.

Regarding cricket I did go on to read the Wimsey books as a result of this book. Who was this Mr.Tallboy? What had he done? Thank you very much for the links to cricket terms. As a result of reading CT and Murder Must Advertise, I was able to hold my own at a dinner party (in America) once, in which two of the attendees were British, the others American. A conversation about baseball evolved into one about cricket, and I was the only person able to participate intelligently. So intelligently the Brits asked where I’d played cricket. Thank you AF and DSL.

Having only read AT, EOT, and CT, I didn’t really mind Ginty too much, as she is sort of a peripheral character in those books. Now that I know her whole story, I’m not at all impressed.

Love the roof tradition, and its role later in the book. Have always wondered up until now, exactly what Nick did say about K getting married, having no information on it either. I do wonder whatever made AF decide that K wasn’t Oxford material and really needed some children right away.

I would like to see a fic about Miranda at home, differentiating the relationships she has with her mother and father, how she feels about all of her “activities’, and how she feels about returning to school. She seems very self-assured, but seems also to really need Nick as a friend—perhaps she is lonely at home. Loved the Yuletide fic about Miranda and Nick after Kingscote.

[hooloovoo_42]

Re seafaring ancestors - I was completely overjoyed to discover not only a mariner in my ancestry, but the fact that my g-gf didn't, in fact, join the RN, but the Royal Marines. We knew that he had deserted from his ship and gone to join the Army, but had no information about his service up to that point. A distant relative recently sent me a copy of his RM service record. He trained in the RM artillery, which probably had an influence on him later joining the Royal Artillery.

Miranda's holiday

[jumpingpowder.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this - I'm really glad to be reading this again, especially as I have a pristine paperback I found in a local junk shop for £1!

I like imagining Miranda's holiday, compared to Nick's. It's early 1970s, and her mother takes her to a 'a kibbutz in Palestine' - anyone have any thoughts on this? I remember her also being busy with refugee committees (which refugees?) in another book. It always sounds as if Miranda's parents are effectively separated.

And I'm puzzled by the age of small Miranda and Jan in her jerkin. If lower III is 11, are the Seconds 9-10, and the 'junior side' the under 8s? I suppose Miranda wasn't boarding then, though, since it was (cough) the war and they'd been evacuated there. Impressive lot of reciting, however old Jan was.

Re: Miranda's holiday

[antfan.livejournal.com]

I think, bearing in mind the sliding time scale of the series, the refugees must be Jewish refugees post World War II, presumably many of them survivors of the camps or otherwise displaced. (I think it's End of Term that's mentioned?) Presumably she's involved in efforts to relocate them to Palestine/Israel. In Attic Term, Mrs West is mentioned as being a strong Zionist.