Some children read; some devour any & all printed matter. I fell into the latter category. Each & every week I took out my full allotment from, not one, but 2 libraries. That was between 8 & 20 books a week [the numbers increased over time as libraries became more generous with their lending policies] & I could read the lot in a week.
Mind you, by the time I reached High School & realised any mathematical acumen would forever be beyond my reach, I acquired several extra hours in which to read by slipping my present reading material under my desk. Granted a large part of my reading was hardly edifying but I was reading
The Taming of the Shrew for pleasure in primary school simply because we owned a complete compilation of The Bard's works & that was the one that grabbed my fancy.
We were a home that owned books. One reason my mother worked so hard in school was because books were always given as prizes & in due time I inherited her Billabong & Dimsie books. Unlike her I had no desire to go to boarding school. Ever. The thought of being locked up with a hoard of females my own age & made to conform to an extrovert schedule appalled me. I did, however, acquire a taste for what is known as *school stories*. Along with Dimsie were the Abbey Girls & the Chalet school , Angela Brazil, & even Enid Blyton dabbled. There were the boys books too: Tom Brown's Schooldays; Jennings; Billy Bunter. I didn't discriminate. The good, the bad & the indifferent were all grist for the mill.
I could, however, tell the difference & it is to my eternal joy I was blessed to stumble upon Antonia Forest, one of the good ones. Excellent.
I have never understood why Forest [not her real name] got lumbered with the lable: school stories. Certainly 4 of her books about the Marlow family are set @ Kingscote, an elite girls boarding school, but 2 are historical novels & 4 others deal with a variety of other things like the War [II], the Brontes, falconry, pigeon racing & mixed families but even when Forest was still alive, still publishing, she was a seriously underrated writer. I have never understood why. I adored her. But even then her books were as rare as hen's teeth & incredibly hard to lay hands on.
I did manage, by dint of accessing the Inter~library Loan system, to eventually read all the books, not in sequence, & I did manage to buy all the school ones in paperback. As an adult I see that Forest's delightful sense of irony & the sarcasm of some of her characters would likely go over many children's heads but as a reader who enjoys books about books, Forest was a wonderful introduction to the world of unknown literature & most of my older copies of her work have scribbled notes in their margins where I looked up casual references I didn't recognise: Hakluyt; Blessed Edmund Campion; or Baby Lon...Better yet was the delightful sense of recognition for I could recite The Highwayman, had read Apollo's Mask & wanted to marry Lord Peter Wimsey, to say nothing of stumbling upon The Lyke Wake Dirge in all its glory. This was a world where esoteric knowledge & my reading habits were not out of place.
However it is Forest's handle on character that resonates authentically. No~one is all good. No~one is all bad. Good characters do stupid things & bad ones do noble things & the internal conflict of navigating the morass of other people's feelings & emotions is as daunting now as it was then. She is so good that those of us lucky enough to find her as a child have continued to enjoy her work as adults & predictably we hold onto her books. They do not end up in Jumble sales or the Thrift Shops. Rare. Very rare indeed~ as I found when I began to scout round hoping to scrounge up a copy of every one of her books.
The 1st one I aimed for was
The Ready~Made Family because in many ways it is my favourite. It cost me a small fortune & came from America, not England as one would suppose. The basic outline goes: Nicola's oldest sister Karen gets married. However she is just 19; he is 41 with 3 children. As Nicola's brother, Peter, observes:
D'you think there was a ghastly pause after Kay said, And there's another seven @ home?
There was a gruesome ghastly pause after Kay said He's 41 with 3 children, I can tell you that...
Peter has the awful habit of talking Mummerzet ~ an invented west counties dialect that is simply infuriating, even to read. Actually Peter is infuriating; in turns charming, kind, arrogant & obnoxious. In some books I really like him, but not in this one. As an adult all my sympathies lie with the adults he's driving to distraction. One of those is his new F~I~L, a man who is consistently portrayed, from the children's point of view, as an unlikable old fuddy~duddy &
why Kay marries him no~one can understand...! And this is why I like Forest. Right @ the very end, Forest turns everything on it's head for Nicola finds herself contemplating
this suddenly different person; he gave her a thin, ironic smile & she saw that he might indeed be, not only a different, but an easier person than she'd thought: one, with whom, to put it @ it's lowest, one would be able to share the occasional joke... & on that thought pushes Lord Peter forward like a chess piece & finds herself reciprocated.
It does help if you get the references because of sub~texts & all that but it's not necessary. I just have the sort of mind that likes to know what everyone is talking about but the books can be read & enjoyed if you know nothing of the Brontes, have never hunted hawks, & thought all pigeons were good for was defacing statues. It's all a matter of taste, but for my money, Forest is worth every cent.
