trennels | Attic Term: Readthrough, Chapters 9-12 (Reply)

My apologies for this being a day late: I had planned to finish it yesterday, but there was what might be described as very nearly a nasty accident (no harm done) and I didn't. Anyway, here goes.

This chapter does a wonderful job of suggesting how a mixture of loneliness and disaffection can prompt futile and perverse action. Forest often suggests that Ginty's emotions are less than genuine: that takes on an aggravated aspect here, as she persists in playing poorly to demonstrate to Craven that her 'feelings weren't to be switched on and off to order'. Her surprise at not being much disappointed in to not being chosen for the team is also, I think, plausible: life really has lost its savour for her. Her four remaining friends' reactions to being in the teams when Ginty is excluded tells us a lot about each of them with extreme economy. Her reflection on the arithmetic of friendship, in which six is not equal to two threes, and which has now become 'twice two plus one', is memorably elegant.

I enjoy the conversation between Ginty and Ann, simply because we rerely see much interaction between them, and it made me think about the very different ways in which they react to and cope with being the middle of the family. The Marlow siblings have their semi-official division into quarterdeck and lower deck, and that gulf opens between the two sisters whose temperaments could scarcely be more different. There are some phrases to relish here: I love 'infantile figures, extinguished by pullovers' and Ann's 'sisterly look'. Inchoate disgruntlement, such as Ginty feels here, seems foreign to Ann, for whom unhappiness has distinct causes which must in turn be overcome: an immensely irritating response to adolescent dissatisfaction. But her reflection on Ginty suffering more than Lawrie because Lawrie releases her feelings where Ginty frets is astute.

I wonder what Ginty dislikes about The Red Shoes? It actually seems rather her sort of thing. Perhaps too much so.

And another intervention by Mrs Lambert and her pedantic manner: I think Ginty's mixture of defiance of Mrs Lambert, guilt at knowing she has nonetheless been impolite and fear of the consequences of that rudeness sets a wonderfully complex groundwork for her decision to use the phone. So different from Nicola's, and yet it's the shame of being afraid to do something that Nicola wasn't that gives Ginty the final push.

Remembering my own schooldays, I don't think that phoning one's mother would be much of an excuse for having entered the school office and used the phone without permission. By the standards of the Marlow's holiday capers it's absurdly low risk, but it seems inconsistent that a school with so many Shopping Party rules and regulations hasn't quite impressed upon its charges the idea of the school office, with all its sensitive material, being out of bounds.

Then, the first conversation with Patrick. I'm endeared by the thought of him taking bus rides for fun (I do that). A hint of a possible future career for him, though I don't know whether liking the look of Lincoln's Inn is a very sound basis for a legal career: I can't see Patrick as a lawyer, myself. What do people make of his message for Nicola? It seems significant in terms of the evolution of the friendships, and Ginty's reluctance to actually pass it on is deliciously awkward, but I wonder if people think Patrick has any motivation for it. Ginty doesn't seem, initially too thrown by it, though 'Oh darling Patrick' strikes an off-note of affectation. Dilys Carver's card is so memorable that sometimes I think of it out of the blue. Mad success or mess? Who was it for? We shall never know.

Ginty’s luck again lets her down, as Mrs Lambert reports her discourtesy: the image of Mrs Lambert lurking by ‘making sure she was sufficiently avenged’ is a neat detail. Meanwhile, Ginty has been reluctant to pass on Patrick’s message, but finally does so, ‘abruptly’ as these things tend to come out. Nicola, understandably (though not, it seems, to herself--‘some indefinable reason’), is reluctant, and deflects the situation with prehensile antics. There’s been some commentary in other threads about the way in which this novel blurs the worlds of Home and School--almost hermetically sealed from one another in most of the rest of the series. Day girls also play a bigger role than before. I rather like it: it seems both more plausible for a 1970s setting and a sign that Forest is still interested in innovating and experimenting. But what do you think?

The scenes dealing with the carol service are among my favourites in the novel, and this one is a tour de force. Tim is clearly still at her Headmistress’s Niece bit, indignantly appealing Ussher’s decision not to allow Upper IVA to warble ‘incomprehensibly in foreign tongues.’ I could see that one coming, with Miss Keith’s communitarian spirit and her tendency to regard the Play as a religious act (she’s a natural supporter of vernacular worship, to touch on another theme) and presumably so could Miss Ussher. Tim has now been confirmed in her role as dictatorial (‘this isn’t the Eurovision song contest’) Master of Revels: I’m amused by how the form simply leave it up to her, confident she’ll put on a show. What happenes if she decides not to, or fails to come up with the goods? This has been your regularly scheduled fic prompt.

UIVA’s scorn for the ‘feeble’ Sixth and their ideas is perhaps an index of their growing-up; it touches on the school-story perennial of hero-worship.

Miranda still has a sense of herself as outsider, but Tim, showing a confidence in her own judgement on inter-faith relations (wonder where she gets that from, albeit in inverted form?) is having none of it. That exchange moves neatly into the case of another outsider, poor Meg Hopkins, still suffering the consequences of the Prosser affair.

Maggie’s ‘honest dismay’ at ‘poems’ always delights me. Tim’s choices are rather good, don’t you think? Not sure about the de la Mare, though I love ‘Linden Lea’ and I can imagine Miranda’s arrangement (with Pomona’s adjustment--a sung reprise I think would have been a bit much) working. Canny Tim, to have planned something for Lawrie to shine at, and her ‘carefully casual’ announcement of it. I don’t ship them, but I can sort of see why people might: there’s a touch of mentor and protegé dynamic there. I also adore Nicola’s ‘It looks too religious. Miranda, you do it,’ which is a much more tactful way to answer Miranda’s uncertainties than Tim’s bossiness.

What do people make of Miss Keith’s handling of the Changear row? In narrative and characterisation terms it foreshadows the flap over the telephone business beautifully, but looked at from the perspective of school discipline and management I find it rather hard to make sense of. The ban on purchasing pocket-money-priced clothes without parental consent seems peculiar in the first place: if sweets and books are OK, why not the odd pair of second-hand slacks? Miss Keith is also conflating a possible case of bullying in UIVB (or that’s how I’ve always read it: I see on closer attention that it could well have been a day girl offloading some ‘expensive’ Mummy’s-friends-to-tea-dismals in return for something more hip, and getting nabbed: I remember a similar row occurring with a friend who had enthusiastically swapped good-but-dreary clothes for a pile of cheap fashionable tat and whose parents insisted she must have been bullied into it, because look at those appalling things) with the rule about not buying clothes. I’m also a bit puzzled (from a Watsonian point of view; the Doylist is obvious) why she should be so intent on finding out who first ‘discovered’ the shop, as opposed simply to who might have bought or exchanged clothes there. It’s not the source of the Nile or the peak of Everest: there’s a sign with purple tipsy letters outside; the Oxfam volunteers know about it; the UIVB girls found it more or less independently when Nicola and Miranda refused to tell them. From a discipline point of view, why on earth does it matter who found it first? Distinctly flawed in other books, Miss Keith actually seems slightly deranged in this one: pursuing her own ideas about causation at the expense of reasonable discipline.

Odd that Ann, if not Ginty, haven’t remarked before on their younger sisters’ colourful clothes?
Miss Latimer is utterly lovable in her suggestion of a strategy for UIVA’s owning-up: I like particularly her disclaiming of credit if it works and accepting the blame if it doesn’t, and Nicola’s spirited appreciation of it.

Then we come to the actual strip-tearing. I like Miranda’s attempt to explain about Elsa, and Miss Keith’s total incomprehension of such adolescent scruple. There’s been some discussion of the rule about telling Shopping Party prefects of planned purchases: it sounds a peculiar and redundant one to me too, and I can quite understand why Gina French skipped it--I wouldn’t want to know, in fact (this sort of thing is possibly why I was not a school prefect.) But school rules are often peculiar and redundant, I suppose. Nicola’s incredulous reaction to possibly being an object of admiration to the lower forms is delicious (I bet she is, or will be when she gets to the Fifth--this has been your regular &c.)

I’m touched both by Nick and Lawrie’s determination to hang on to the clothes and their (slightly childish?) embarrassment at the thought of Latimer seeing a maternal endearment. (I also love Pam’s seamless decoding of the capitalised instruction.) Lawrie’s shift dress sounds fantastically horrible.

Ginty’s reflection on the difference between the ‘feel’ of school in summer and winter really struck me on this reading. And this must, one reflects, be the most accident-prone set of O-level papers for years.

Ann’s ticking off (‘But why did you do it?’) is irritating, but does chime with the novel’s theme of just-because adolescent recklessness. And I’m amused by her actually secretly sharing Nicola’s opinion of Gina French’s lack of authority.
Miranda’s Visiting Day confession to Miss Keith forms another strand in the novel’s exploration of causation. I like the fact that Nicola’s thoughts turn to the endearing hippie youth, and she hopes (vainly) he won’t get in trouble.

Berenice’s doting grandfather is surely worth a drabble or two? Lawrie’s distinction between reading and reciting always pleases me (though I suspect her actual performance, impressed as UIVA are by it, is the sort of actorly reading of a poem--think Richard Burton making a dog’s-own meal of ‘Welsh Incident’--that gives me the professional heeby-jeebies.)

Ginty’s telephoning has now become something of a compulsion (can she really not have thought of the cost of the calls, by the way? In my parents’ household, nearly twenty years after the publication of Attic Term, any telephone call longer than about five minutes in duration would have one of my parents coming in and wagging fingers at me, because my school and most of my friends were in another telephone district and National Telephone Calls Are Expensive. We also had roughly the Trennels attitude to Hot Water. Does she not consider that the extra cost is likely to be registered and enquired into when the next bill comes in?)

I’m intrigued by the way Forest entwines Ginty’s superstitions with Patrick’s offer of intercessory prayer; almost as if she’s challenging the reader to make an equation of Catholicism with superstition.

And at last, a Claudie conversation! I noticed this time that Patrick’s embarrassment at her calling Ginty his ‘girlfriend’ is expressed in an oddly conditional mood. (‘Claudie would state’... ‘He could always retort’) I think this might be the present habitual--common in Hiberno-English, where it translates an Irish verbal form--meaning that it’s something that happens reasonably regularly, but it standard English it leaves open the possibility that it’s something that Patrick has only imagined happening and has shied away from on that account. I don’t much care for the terms boy/girlfriend myself (and didn’t even when I was Patrick’s age) but that he cannot truthfully offer an alternative (‘no, just a friend’ being presumably recognised as treacherous) is telling.

Marlowverse idiom is a tough call for anyone, one reflects, let alone an ESL learner. I don’t know the film about a ‘demented female who walked around with skinned rabbits in her handbag’. Anyone recognise it?

Rather nice that it’s ‘carry on’ that set Patrick off on a string of inadvertent innuendoes--someone stop that boy watching Up Pompeii! I’ll leave consideration of Patrick’s alarming sexual scruples to the general discussion, pausing only to note how radically his grudging admission of sex work to acceptability changes how we understand the rest. Without ‘--okay--if it’s paid for’, we can see him arguing that sex should proceed from a strong emotional bond (‘someone you--care for’), which is a sympathetic position even if you don’t particularly agree with it. With the partial admission of paid-for sex to admissibility (absolvability?) the worldview alters to a distinctly sexist one (I don’t think the Merrick Boy is claiming that male prostitution is in the least okay, whatever the gender of the client, nor that it's occurred to him that women might pay other women to have sex with them, but maybe I’m underestimating him?), and the meaning of ‘care for’ changes from ‘someone you love and respect’ to ‘someone you mean to make an honest woman out of.’ It sounds like a mildly unlikely, though far from impossible, stance for a 16-year-old in 1971 to take, but to me it has that ineluctable ring of from life about it. I’m also interested by ‘as one technically lapsed Catholic to another’: a interesting parapraxis. He only means, I think that Claudie is ‘technically lapsed’, but that’s not what he says. Or do others have different readings of that?

Though I’m scarcely well-disposed to the Merrick Boy coming out of that one, I really enjoy his subsequent conversation with his father. Further indications here that Patrick’s faith is more a matter of form than content (‘if you didn’t think that it mattered enough that we hared off to these outlandish places for a proper Mass, I’d probably have packed the whole thing in by now’) though I accept that the content/form division is probably not one he’d recognise: still, the indication that if his family were of the reform tendency he’d drift towards agnosticism is suggestive. Though in many ways this is a prickly conversation, I like the way Forest suggests affection--love, indeed--between father and son. It’s also bristly with fic possibility: anyone fancy writing the argument between Alan and Patrick from Alan’s point of view? Or perhaps Anthony Merrick reflecting on his own schooldays (‘You mean you were belted?’ speaks volumes, I think.) Patrick’s masterly distinction between being unhappy and just loathing the place is almost enough to make me like him again.

This is perhaps my favourite chapter in the novel, and one of my favourites in the series: Tim and Miranda, lolling in deck chairs on the staff terrace (chilly, in what must be late October, November?) and hanging out in the music room (at my school, definitely a place to get up to no good whatever).

I love the mention of Sordello--I read it for exactly the same reason as Tim does, and it is, actually, quite difficult, though nothing like as bad as Jane Carlyle or whoever it was would have it.

Again, that horror of poetry, and the reassurance that ‘it only has to rhyme and scan’. I adore Miranda getting Maiden Mother and Holy Son in the ‘right order’, but then getting needlessly embarrassed about ‘Israel’. Miranda really does sense Miss Keith’s will to exclude, I think, with her qualms about what she would think about Miranda helping to write a carol. It’s interesting that Tim seems to ascribe similar feelings to Ann Marlow (the source for this more likely to be auntly than from Ann’s sisters, one feels) and Jean Baker. Ann does have quite a sectarian view of religion, as we discover in Run Away Home, but I’d never registered anything of the sort from Jean.

Miranda’s appetite for the unlikely echoes the end of End of Term, at which point a few people mentioned that her comments had the flavour of a certain sort of Christian apologetics represented by C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and there was a general sense of relief that Forest chose not to pursue a conversion narrative for Miranda. Here, indeed, it turns out very like the reverse. I’ll leave commentary on the story about Miranda’s aunt to the general discussion, except to say this has been your regularly scheduled &c. And also, Tim’s rowdy Scottish forebears. (I have to say I always imagine--and write--Miss Keith as actually Scottish, and am abashed to discover that it’s her grandfather who was.)

And with Nicola’s realisation of Tim and Miranda’s united unsinkability, we close for this week.

Have at it!