Antonia Forest fans

Those glimpses are fascinating. I'm never that sure how to reconcile them with Ann as endlessly-taken-advantage-of sibling, though, if you go on the basis that we initially develop a character within the family before trying it out in the outside world. Are we to imagine Ann behaving helpfully/responsibly as she does at home when she first goes to Kingscote and discovering that it's responded to entirely differently there? Or that, though she has built-in beliefs about automatically loving your relations, she's unhampered by that thinking when no relations are involved and is therefore less wet...?

It's just that one would expect her to be the well-meaning Guide patrol leader who was always nodding understandingly about why someone's uniform was incomplete/they were late/the dog ate their homework. rather than Commander Marlowishly 'handing out the jobs and letting one get on with them'...