Antonia Forest fans

And thank you for that. Reading this, I was starting to think I lived in a different universe, where I lived in hand-me-downs from my sister that were in turn handed down to my younger cousins (and at 29 I still receive with thanks cast-offs of my sister's) and my daughter (though, yes, she's still a baby) has owned about 5 items of new clothing in her life - most are handed down from my sister's son and most of those were not new to him. What on earth is wrong with that? And the more so for party clothes, which have no chance of being worn out before being outgrown. Apart from the fact that the Marlow books are (mostly and sort of) set at a time when wastefulness would have been far more frowned on than it is now, I actively like the idea of reading books where disposability is not a virtue.