Time and the Marlows

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I have now read all the modern-day Marlow books I can lay my hands on, which is all but The Marlows and the Traitor (which I remember quite well from when I was 11 or so) and The Thuggery Affair (which I gather is no great loss).

I love these books and mourn the lack of any more. In fact: sorrow! I will probably read the Player ones on the strength of them. The characters are so well drawn and well understood and not always likeable either, which makes them feel very real (except for Giles whom I dislike for being so arrogant and full of himself--and unkind in Autumn Term; I hope he never marries) and I also like how we see a part of their lives with so much more having happened and about to. We'll never know what happened between Nicola and Esther when she went back to school, or how Judith recovered from Edward running away, or how Kay coped with her family, and after all, RL is untidy like that too.

Does anyone know whether AF had any plans for future books and what would have happened in them?

The one thing I find jarring in the books is the very obvious placement of each in a different time and often decade. Why did AF feel it was necessary? The mention of the war in the earlier ones is part of them and places them, as does Ginty having to go through an operator to phone London, but apart from that a reader could, if allowed to, imagine the books to be set in their own era; country life and boarding school haven't changed much. Kingscote in the 50s wasn't much different to my school decades later. So I find gratuitous references to the Beatles, Up Pompeii, punks, Morecombe and Wise etc not just jarring but unnecessary to the story and Pastede On. If the Marlows were watching TV without the programme being mentioned, I would just keep reading, but mention a specific programme for no reason and I stop in my tracks, disconcerted.

The deliberate insertion of current slang feels odd too, or is it just because it's no longer current? Did people really call clothes 'gear' back in the 70s? OTOH I do love what I assume is specifically Marlow family slang like natch, trimmensely (both of which I used as a kid), and sorrow. Come to think of it though, 'sorrow' can't be a Marlowism because Patrick says it too.

I'm curious about Peter's dreadful nickname of Binks. How do you get that from Peter? Is it a baby name they keep on calling him? I'm totally with him on his objections to it, but the others persist in using it. Is it some sort of common baby name in England that might stick? My mother had a friend called Bunty and I could never understand how she put up with it. [shudders]

Comments

[richenda.livejournal.com]

>>>I imagine that was the result of TV, and even more so now

And radio - radio Luxembourg and then the pirate stations - e.g. East Anglian boarding schools/Radio Caroline
I don't know if the Radio Essex re-enaction of the pirate radio stations (2003?) is still up on their website, but that would give you a flavour of what people were listening to on their "trannies" - often smuggled' sometimes reluctantly peermitted

[mrs-redboots.livejournal.com]

Not just East Anglian boarding-schools - at mine, in Hampshire, the common-room radios were permanently tuned to either Radio Caroline or, more usually, Radio London (another pirate ship moored off Frinton-on-Sea!). We were not allowed private trannies, but several people smuggled them in anyway.

[richenda.livejournal.com]

>>>>the common-room radios were permanently tuned to either Radio Caroline or, more usually, Radio London (another pirate ship moored off Frinton-on-Sea!).

Thank you - yes, of course - I've muddled - it was Radio London, not Caroline that was off Frinton.
Day girls boasted of having been in one of the cars at Frinton that signalled to the ship
But caroliiiiiiiiiine was the song that everyone associated with the pirates.

[mrs-redboots.livejournal.com]

They were both off Frinton at one stage; wasn't it Caroline who slipped her anchor on one famous occasion and had to be rescued by the Walton Lifeboat?

Radio London closed down when pirate radios became illegal in the late 1960s, but Radio Caroline is, as far as I know, still going, although not from a ship moored off Frinton.

[richenda.livejournal.com]

Radio Essex recreated a pirate ship - they moored it off the Ha'penny pier in Harwich, and had much fun, with the former DJs doing stints in the same way that they used to - and being smuggles on and off the boat as used to happen in the old days.
One day a mobile phone went off by mistake on air, and they pretended that it was a musical birthday card