by Lucy Mangan
So, it turned out, had the doctors. While they retraced their paths, Dad sat – quietly – on the sofa, getting thinner. And quieter. Mum got busier. And noisier. Grandma came down more often and played more ‘Bobby Shaftoe’ for us.
Eventually the doctors found what they had missed, and it turned out to be Hodgkin’s disease, or cancer of – ta dah! – the lymph glands. ‘You’re very lucky!’ said his doctor, still flushed with the thrill of discovery. ‘It’s a young man’s disease, but if you’d got it then, you’d be dead! Things are much better now.’
And they were, in the very important sense that Dad didn’t die. But it was a gruelling year of treatment for him, and for my mother, as he sat on the sofa, getting thinner still, and quieter, and colder – we used to heap more and more blankets on him as each cycle of treatment progressed, and then peel them off as each one ended – and balder and bluer, as the dye telling all the scanner and radiation whatnots where to go worked its way through his system.
My sister used to sit behind him and stroke what remained of what she called his ‘rabbit hair’. I want to say that I retreated into my books, but I’m not sure that’s true. Partly because I was already reading as much as was humanly possible – I couldn’t have retreated further into my books without coming out the back and meeting myself round the front again – and partly because again, my sister and I were protected from the worst of it. We never really knew that he might die and, not really having any understanding of what chemotherapy felt like, that was all that mattered to us. Except for one awful evening, when he started to cry (and Emily and I, thinking he was pretending, started to laugh) over the supper we were all eating on our knees – his heavily blanketed – in front of the television, we thought that everything was basically okay.
But I think perhaps my books did become more important to me than they might otherwise have done. Maybe I wasn’t retreating in the sense of reading more, but perhaps I escaped more fully into them now that there was something to escape from.
At a more practical level, his illness threw me back on already-accumulated resources. I reread more, and books I hadn’t quite fancied when Dad had first brought them home took on a new attractiveness now that my main supply had been cut off at source.
One day, up in my room (the rules about reading only in communal areas having been temporarily suspended), I reluctantly picked up a paperback that seemed to have been hanging around for ages. It looked awful. Its cover was so drab – even for me, a child with an abnormally high drab tolerance – that it almost made me cross. The whole thing was in tones of brown – a picture of a wood-panelled corridor and a big wooden noticeboard, relieved only by the (dark, almost brownish) blonde hair of the twin girls standing in front of it and the dark blue of their tunics. One had her hands covering her face in sorrow and the other was gingerly trying to comfort her.
The set-up was not inviting. Also, it was a school story; End of Term, by Antonia Forest. At twelve, I felt a bit too sophisticated now for school stories. A bit played out in the whole jolly-hockey-sticks field, y’know?
But, needs must. And so I lay on my bed and opened those uninviting covers. By the time I closed them, several hours later, a towering, passionate and enduring love had been born in me, for the Marlow twins, their friends and above all for their creator, who had given me a new world to live in, and a new level of writing – and reading – to get to grips with.
Richard Adams said of Watership Down that he had set out to write a grown-up book for children.fn3 Forest did not set out with any such conscious intention (in fact, her first book about the Marlow family, Autumn Term, was conceived as simply the most likely way to get a publishing contract at the time – 1948), but nevertheless, that is exactly what she did too.
End of Term (and Autumn Term, The Cricket Term and Attic Term, which I would discover in due course) are technically school stories. They are set at Kingscote boarding school and the events the twins (Lawrie and Nicola) and their sisters take part in there include many of the standards: being unfairly left out of teams, getting (and not getting) parts in the school play, negotiating friendships, shifting loyalties and small treacheries. But there are no high dramas – no gorse-anchored clifftop rescues, no hidden heirlooms, no near-drownings, no mysterious figures who turn out to be long-lost uncles or overzealous guardians. Boarding-school-story conventions are in fact often lightly mocked. At one point, for example, Tim (real name Thalia – ‘A muse or something. Mother would have it, though Father did his best’) likens Nicola to a character being ‘very, very competent and awfully, awfully keen’. Kingscote is not an idyll. Its pupils are not perfect and neither – more shockingly – are its teachers, whom the pupils see at all times with clear rather than ennobling/idolising eyes. Rowan, one of Lawrie and Nicola’s older sisters, describes her relationship with headmistress Miss Keith as ‘delicately balanced on a razor-edge of mutual toleration’. A wonderful phrase that I took instantly to my heart and have used many times in life since, and it encapsulated what I was most drawn to about the characters and the writer – the cool command they shared, the slight sense of detachment from life in order to keep perspective on it. It was like a bracing plunge bath after the close, sweaty sauna of more traditional school stories. You emerged from a Forest novel – and I instinctively reach for that word rather than book or story because everything was as finely and accurately drawn as in any fiction for adults – as braced as you had been entertained. My mind felt keener and sharper after every reading. Maybe it even was.
Forest’s characters – especially Nicola, who is at the heart of all but one of the Marlow books – grew and developed in the course of the book and the series in a way I had not come across before. Everything about them was so precisely drawn that it made me whimper with pleasure. At the beginning of End of Term, for instance, Nicola befriends through force of circumstance a new girl, Esther. They get on well enough, but don’t really have much in common. By the end of the book, Nicola regards her new acquaintance thus: ‘She still thought Esther awfully pretty – beautiful, she amended shyly – but she wouldn’t really mind if she ended up in another form.’ The first time I read that, I genuinely wriggled with delight. That the forthright, rigorously honest Nicola would amend her thought is perfectly judged. That her undemonstrative nature would also cause her to amend it, even within the confines of her own mind, shyly, ensured that the readerly cup of satisfaction runneth over. And the overlapping layers of consciousness involved in moments like Patrick’s interest in Nicola’s tale of woe at being lied about by the treacherous older girl Lois Sanger (again, not drawn as a simple villain but a messy tranche of human flaws and weaknesses, none decisively contemptible in themselves but together amounting to something much worse than the sum of their parts). ‘How queer,’ he says. ‘I wonder how she thinks about it? … Well – what does she tell herself? I mean – how does she make it alright for herself? Or doesn’t she? Does she think she’s a heel too?’ Which in turn makes Nicola a bit cross. ‘She would rather have a bit of sympathy, she decided, than all this speculation about Lois Sanger.’ But Patrick has been out of school too long – and, maybe, is simply too much a boy – to quite understand. As a portrait of how we interpret ourselves, each other, ourselves to each other, each other to each other and how little ever goes unmediated in life, it is quite brilliant.
Patrick, incidentally, was also Catholic (like the author, who converted from Judaism at a young age) – the first I’d met in a book, and it pleased me very much. He displaced Dickon in my pantheon of childhood literary crushes. I recognised his various struggles with his conscience in me, and his stubbornness and frustration with his faith in the members of my wider family, and he felt, immediately, deeply, like a friend. Again, it makes me wonder as Private – Keep Out! made me wonder – if that tiny thing meant so much to me, how much more does seeing yourself mean when you diverge more fully from the expected narrative?
The hits just kept on coming in End of Term. Th
ere was the moment the singing director for the school Christmas service, Dr Herrick, coaches Nicola in the singing of her opening solo. ‘Try to sing it with regret,’ he urges. ‘Once in Royal David’s City. Not now, you see. Now we have only been pretending. But once, long ago, if we’d only had the luck to be there, just once this thing really happened.’ Have you ever come across anything that better captures the evanescent magic of a carol service? A better evocation of the mass of love and memories, past and present, yearning, joy and sadness all knotted up together that for most of us comprises Christmas? Under Forest’s and Dr Herrick’s tutelage I could hear the deep music in a glorious song of old.
And then (and then, and then, and then – I could go on forever about this single book of Forest’s but I will limit myself to just one more scene) there was the truly revelatory moment that came after Lawrie, who has recently lost out on the coveted part of Shepherd Boy in the school play to Nicola, crawls into bed with a secretly injured leg (another standard trope which again in Forest’s hands becomes so much more than a simple plot device) to consider whether she should suggest that Nicola – who has similarly been left out of the netball team for unknown reasons – pretend to be her and play in the match instead. She runs through the different possibilities. First, ‘the easy one’ – what fun it would be for Nicola to play and how nice of Lawrie to let her. Second – ‘less disinterested’ – that if she does let her, someone will somehow arrange things so that she can have a crack at playing Shepherd Boy. And finally, ‘the underneath part, the bit she didn’t like’ thinks that if Nicola does play netball and gets found out, she will be chucked out of the play and then even though Lawrie won’t be playing Shepherd Boy either, she won’t feel so bad about it.
It was the most comprehensive, delicate anatomising of someone’s inner life I had yet met, and I raced on. As the Marlow series progresses, Nicola, her friends and her siblings discover that life in and outside school is hard to negotiate, full of compromises and moral equivocations and that the adult world is no promised land. Forest provides agonisingly exact portraits of the psychological bullying in which girls – then, now and for ever – specialise, and there is a quiet, heart-stopping moment in End of Term when Nicola realises that the friend they made in the first book, Autumn Term, Tim, is no longer her friend as she is Lawrie’s. ‘She sat very still. Even her legs stopped swinging. Because it was nearly always like that, she took it for granted that people liked her better than Lawrie. Only Tim didn’t. Tim liked Lawrie best.’ I could feel that simple, bald final line dropping like a cold pebble into my soul as it must have Nicola’s. In Cricket Term, death intrudes, followed by a subtle and yet brutally realistic and unsentimental scene in which the girls try to navigate not just their first experience of death but the death of someone they didn’t like very much.
The school-set books are interspersed with others about the Marlows at home in the holidays. They weren’t available to buy by the time I was looking – urgently – for them but still hanging on, just, in libraries. I eventually tracked down Falconer’s Lure (a pony book in which the pony is replaced by a falcon), The Marlows and the Traitor and Runaway Home (adventure stories), all of whose traditional ingredients and constraints are as transformed and transcended by Forest as the school stories are in the others, and Peter’s Room whose story of the Marlows imitating the Brontës’ Angria- and Gondal-weaving antics I worshipped beyond all the others – until I discovered what I think is Forest’s masterpiece, The Ready-Made Family.
Karen, the oldest sister, returns from Oxford with the news that she is marrying Edwin, an older, widowed-while-separated don who already has two children. After the wedding, they all come and stay at the Marlow family pile, Trennels. The rest of the book has a perfunctory plot while the meat of it explores the tensions created by the sudden advent of Edwin – a difficult man to like at the best of times – and his children, and their rarely articulated burden of sorrow, into the family’s life. In the final chapters, one of the children, Rose, runs away. Nicola realises she has probably gone back to her mother’s house in Oxford and rescues her from the near-clutches of a man who is pretending to be her uncle. A lesser writer would make the return of Rose to her new family and a new start the happy ending of the book. Instead, Forest lingers on Rose’s train ride back to Trennels with her father and Nicola, and delivers a delicate, almost unbearably moving portrait of and meditation on grief.
Edwin asks Rosie why she ran off and she says she just wanted to go home.
‘But you knew there’d be no one there.’
‘I thought p’raps—’ there was a long pause. Then Rose turned her face against Edwin’s coat and said ‘I do miss Mummy so.’
Almost absently Edwin put his arm around her. Presently, in a voice as low as her own, he said ‘So do I, Rosie. So do I.’
There are times, as Nicola discovered at that moment, when it is more tactful to stay put than go discreetly away …
She clenches her fists, trying to prevent floods of tears ‘for Rose, for Edwin – most of all, perhaps, for Karen. At the time she could have found no words to describe this engulfing melancholy; but a year later, when her friend Miranda was called on during a Latin lesson to translate the time-smoothed phrase sunt lacrimae rerum, which she did doubtfully as “there are tears of things” only to be asked by Miss Cartwright what that was supposed to mean, Nicola, though she could have offered no better translation, thought of that train journey and knew exactly what it meant.’
Nothing is simple in Forest’s world, because people are not simple and she is an (elegant but) uncompromising realist. Hers are complicated books, but among the most fulfilling I ever read as a child and remain so for me today. Rose’s ageless grief, known to Virgil and before recorded time, is captured forever in her pages. The Marlow books (and Forest’s one non-Marlow volume, The Thursday Kidnapping) are an intimation of the deeper joys than narrative excitement that fiction can yield. It is for the psychological acuity – and the beauty and clarity with which it is expressed. It was all of this that prompted the author Victor Watson, who has written widely about children’s literature, to describe Forest as Jane Austen for the young. But unlike Austen, Forest has never received her due. She fell out of fashion – she was thought to be too dense, too complex and just too full of Latin tags for the hip young things of the 1970s onwards – and spent a long time out of print. In the 1980s, only the school stories were reprinted and seemed weirdly disjointed without the intervening books to explain references to earlier adventures and the appearances and disappearances of multiple characters. Forest would probably never have been an author with a mass audience, but this dicking about with the books must surely have contributed to her work’s relative anonymity throughout her life. It is an inequity that made me rage violently when I first discovered it, but the edge of my tide of fury was turned when a tiny independent publisher called Girls Gone By started republishing them all a few years ago. Antonia Forest fans remain a small group compared to those of Elinor Brent-Dyer and others, but we are mighty and evangelical. We will, together, spread the word and hopefully ensure a flourishing Forest for years to come. Consider this a couple of acres’ worth, and a tiny dent in the debt I owe her.
The Library
I also had a lot to get through elsewhere. The school library turned out to be pretty fertile ground. As well as harrowing dystopias it also had old favourites like Tom Sawyer in the classics section, new meaty stuff like Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, and lighter fare like Sugar Mouse – the story of a girl coming to terms with her diabetes – and, glory of glories, The Lily Pickle Band Book. I looked up at the top of the cabinet one day, where a few hardbacks were standing on display and there it was, cartoonish figures on a white background, shining down at me while a celestial choir started singing in the background – another book by my beloved Gwen Grant. I reached up reverently and took it in my humble hand. It was true. She had written another book for me. Not a
bout the same girl, but as near as dammit. The heroine, Lily Pickle, is a reincarnation of the nameless heroine of Private – Keep Out!. She still lives in a Nottinghamshire mining town but this time contemporaneously-ish (the book was written in 1982 – there are council estates and a certain amount of lightly sketched deprivation, but no hint of the Iron Lady and the trouble she was about to cause), and still as gobby, world-weary and altogether magnificent as her ancestor. Lily’s dad left when she was six but is reckoned no great loss to the family as he wanted to name her Honolulu Baby after ‘this lass wearing nothing but a blade of grass and a smile’ he once saw in a film. Like Private, the book is basically her diary – this time about the putting together of a neighbourhood children’s band by indefatigable local troupers, Mr Kendal and Mrs Warren. ‘This band though is different from any other band I’ve ever heard about because you don’t have to know how to play anything at all to be in it. All you have to do to join is nod.’ Lily, Mavis Jarvis (‘about twelve feet tall, twelve feet wide and a hundred feet thick in the head. You could spit rivets at her head and she wouldn’t even notice them going in’) and assorted other juvenile flotsam and jetsam from the surrounding flats nod, and various chaotic escapades ensue. It wasn’t quite as good – nothing will ever be quite as good – as the Private trilogy, but it was still a joy, and all the more so for being so wholly unexpected.