Spring Term

[charverz.livejournal.com]

I very much enjoyed this book, but I have one niggling doubt.  Would all of Ginty's associates drop her that quickly for telling lies?  I can see Monica being fed up with Ginty's dishonestly claiming to have been at the diving competition, but would that (and the Nicola letter incident) necessarily turn the whole form against her?

Obviously I'm not a teenaged girl, so I'm somewhat handicapped here!

Comments

[sollersuk.livejournal.com]

Not so much being a teenaged girl as being of the time, social class and setting. Lies were a major offence in middle class families, and the vulnerabilities that went with being at a boarding school made them even worse.

[thekumquat.livejournal.com]

And I'm told going through someone else's drawers and reading their letters were even worse.

I think it's a problem with the timeline - I'd have no problem with the plot in a post-war story but the 80s is when I went to boarding school, by which time honour was dead, no possessions were sacred and everyone knew who the kleptomaniacs were.

On the other hand, Ginty's crowd were a pretty shallow lot and I can see the form joining in 'taking her down a peg or two' with glee.

[colne-dsr.livejournal.com]

Monica and one other (can't remember which one) both owned up to illegally going to the beach, and both got fairly stiff punishment, as a direct result of Ginty's lies about why she was suspended. I know from a different matter (Owen Coyle's defection from Burnley FC to Bolton Wanderers, actually) how much more it hurts when someone you trust and believe to be honest has been lying all along.

Maybe Monica had suspicions that at Christmas she was being used as an escape from home, rather than because Ginty truly wanted to stay. Ginty had been getting the benefit of considerable doubt for quite some time, and the diving comp was the last straw.

[charverz.livejournal.com]

I was in a private boys' school in the mid to late 1960s. We had a series of thefts from the gym change room. We caught the boy, but he wasn't expelled. I won't comment on our sense of honour - my recollection is that we were a pretty poisonous lot.

[charverz.livejournal.com]

Pack mentality turning on the weakest? Certainly possible. Thinking back, AF doesn't have much good to say about the Fifth Form. Like Ginty, they seeem to lack colour. Unlike the Sixth with Lois and Jan Scott at polar opposites, but having their own moments.