the cut RAH scenes

[smellingbottle.livejournal.com]

I just came across a copy of GGB's Celebrating Antonia Forest for the first time. I know other people have talked about the cut passages from Run Away Home before, but I have to say that what grabbed my attention was not so much poor Buster's demise as the little things.

I was slightly gobsmacked by Giles addressing Karen as 'silly bitch!', and saying it 'affectionately' - I suppose because it didn't fit my own sense of Giles' and Karen's relationship, or the kind of thing that Karen would be likely to accept from a brother she doesn't see often and can't know all that well...?  I wasn't sure either, given the complicated chronology of the books, how rude/informal/brotherly AF would have intended it to be.

The other thing that for some reason caught my attention - perhaps was something I didn't expect to see in AF - was the masked children of indeterminate gender at the parish hall cleanup before the play/pantomime/animal barney , to whom Nicola refers as 'the unisexers'. That struck me as a slightly false note from a teenage girl - it sounds like the kind of thing a much older person would come out with: 'Oh, you can't tell boys from girls any more, with the clothes they wear these days!'

There were things I very much liked finding out in the deleted scenes - like Karen admitting to having discounted Edwin's children at the start of their relationship, because she assumed they would always live with their mother, and that she was too deeply in love with him to back out by the time she realised she would be becoming a hands-on stepmother, after Edwin's ex-wife dies. But in general what struck me about the left-out scenes is that leaving them out was absolutely the right thing to do, because the novel works better without them. I'm hugely fond of Buster, but am also glad his death was removed because it removes attention from the Edward Oeschli plot and muddies Nick's responses to Giles' and Peter's departure. And the parish hall cleaning scenes seemed a bit pointless in the scheme of things, though I was amused that Patrick still felt strongly, years on, about the loss of his sixpence down a crack in the stage! And asking Miss Keith to lend the Kingscote thunder-and-lightning equipment seemed a bit nuts!

But the thing that struck me most about the cut scenes is that, compared to the subtlety and richness of AF's prose in the published books, the writing of those scenes is a comparatively flat. I only skimmed the introduction, so I don't know if they were removed at a very early stage in the writing process, but if you compare, say, the account of Nick finding Buster (and having to keep it together to call Patrick and get his body home so no one wonders why an elderly pony drops dead twelves miles from home) with Nick finding Sprog in Peter's Room, it seems quite weakly imagined by AF's standards. I found myself wondering if much of the richness of her writing came from endless re-drafting. Some of the cut scenes really read like sketches, as if she was getting down a basic outline to cut and revise later...

ETA: and the suggestions as to what was going to happen in the next Marlow book-that-never-happened sounded very odd and unlikely to me!

Comments

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

I rather liked the glimpse of Chas being a different person with his school friends, but I agree with you that borrowing the Kingscote equipment sounds bonkers, and very likely to have been scuppered by the terms of the equipment's insurance even if whoever was left in charge at Kingscote didn't take it as an example of Marlows Uber Alles pushiness.

[smellingbottle.livejournal.com]

To me the it just seemed massively out of character that Nick would suddenly get invested enough in making the local version of the animal pageant good that she's prepared to open negotiations with her Headmistress out of the blue in the middle of the holidays to borrow some (as you say) presumably expensive and bulky equipment at no notice - especially when said Headmistress has been heavily involved in punishing the whole phoning thing, and N is In Disgrace....?

[rosathome.livejournal.com]

On Giles and Karen, I agree that the 'silly bitch' comment felt out of place, but I do think that in general they probably are quite close. As the two eldest, there were probably quite a lot of times when it was just them, or 'them' and 'the rest'.

[smellingbottle.livejournal.com]

I suppose I think Giles has simply been away from home on a virtually permanent basis for so long, plus Karen's surprised everyone by acting out of character and ditching Oxford etc, that one would expect less immediate familiarity...?

[rosathome.livejournal.com]

Yes. Though I think that the longstanding friendships of childhood can sometimes (not in every case) be more important than recent contact.

[dawn9163.livejournal.com]

My dad often referred to my mother as the "old bitch" and occasionally to me as the "young bitch" - it wasn't meant to be derogatory. He also used "silly bitch" regularly often not just abou close family. He was born in the 1930s so could have been of the generation that AF was thinking of. It wasn't too bad till he went into a nursing home and started calling the staff it...... Fortunately they understood and were on the whole ok about it.

[biskybat.livejournal.com]

I think you're right. Some people have different attitudes towards words which others find truly offensive. I can well imagine the odious Giles using the word 'bitch' in a casually derogatory manner although coming from AF's pen it still sounds odd to me. Because of its derogatory nature I find it offensive and it isn't a word I'd ever use. Off topic, I know, but arising out of this, there was a press fuss a few months ago about Jacqueline Wilson using the word 'twat'. Depending upon where you live this, this is either an acceptable slang term for 'twit' or 'clot' or it's way up there with the worst possible offensive language.

[rosathome.livejournal.com]

I'm glad I'm not the only person who has been innocently using it as acceptable slang! I was horrified when I discovered what it meant to some people.

[biskybat.livejournal.com]

Geographical, apparently. I never knew it as anything but unacceptable in polite company and was as surprised to find it considered ordinary slang as you were horrified to find that for some it wasn't!

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I think I read somewhere that she did lots of rewriting and refining, which is why there was so long between books.

What were the ideas for the next book?

[smellingbottle.livejournal.com]

Ginty, heading back to school after spending the (Run Away Home) Christmas holidays with Monica, loses her nerve and runs away to Ireland to work in a stables, and Commander Marlow thinks that as she's made her bed, she must lie in it etc and doesn't intervene to make her go back to school, so Ann goes after her, thus ditching her prefectship and any chance of being HG etc.

I'm sure if AF had actually written it, I wouldn't find it implausible, but just as a plot sketch, it sounds odd to me - after Ginty has already dealt with the fall-out of the phoning and managed to wriggle out of having to see Patrick and had the holidays to calm down in, why panic now? And Ann, of all people, to go after her, and thus presumably be a major character, when I would have said AF agreed with Nicola's estimation of her...?

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

On Ann, I always thought AF was waiting to reveal more about her - the Guide badge incident being a hint.

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

Yes, it sounds very implausible as a mere sketch. Ginty had ruled out being a stable girl in the Attic Term as she couldn't face all the mucking out. But then I started thinking, suppose Ginty had a huge row with Monica towards the end of the holidays, and we know her whole family forgot her birthday, so maybe she was tipped over the edge a bit. It would be great to see a story in which Ann was allowed a bit more action, especially as RAH was a bit rough on her. There are quite a few examples throughout the series in which Ann shows a degree of concern for Ginty and insight into her character, and Ann would have felt guilty over forgetting her birthday and probably for not being more help to her the previous term.
In my head I have a short story called Ann's Perfect Christmas to make up for the lonely Xmas she had in RAH. Now I just have to write it down...