A Matter of Taste.

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.