autumn term

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I've just been re-reading Autumn Term, which I haven't done for ages, and don't do nearly so often as the others.  Somehow Nicola (in particular, the others to an extent)  just doesn't totally seem in character for me there.  I know she's always busy and energetic, but somehow the fidgeting, never sitting still, can't settle to read a book, not wanting to be contemplative, etc doesn't sound like her really, nor the physical fighting with Pomona, or the running away to Port Wade and trying to be bad.  I could have seen her thinking through her dilemmas, and deciding somehow what was the honourable thing to do about the desks or something, but just fighting about it feels a bit strange.  (Not to mention wondering just how she escaped for many hours at a time, when later in the series, dashing out to find a phone box or other errands is so impossible for several of the girls!).  I know she's young in this book, and I know that the events of the Marlows and the Traitors would have had a big effect on her and made her grow up a lot by the next books.  And maybe that's all it is.  But somehow, I can't stop sort of 'discounting' Autumn Term as a bit of a trial book, where the characters weren't really decided on, not intended to be a series, and I tend to see the series actually beginning, with the real characters as I see them for most of the series, in Falconer's Lure.  (Not that the characters don't change after that, but just that to me, it feels somewhat more consistent).  Certainly there are many grains of those characters in Autumn Term, and many things that are perfectly consistent, but there are some things that still don't really ring true with me, and that there is more of a difference between that book and the rest, than between the others.  (On the other hand, some of the school-based characters, such as Tim, do seem to be proper characters from Autumn Term on, and seem to develop more consistently).

Does anyone else feel that the series really gets going somewhere else other than the beginning?

(And I do love Autumn Term, too, for not being the classic school story, for the interesting characters, for the play, for the true-to-life description of Guides, and loads of other reasons).