Antonia Forest's marvellous Marlows: A postwar kids’ series with depth, humour, suspense, and characters who are utterly real

What's the plot?

When the Marlows inherit their ancestral home, a huge seaside farm, all sorts of shenanigans ensue - from the simple joys of falconry and midnight horse treks to the perils of railroad rescues and attempted kidnappings, amongst the everyday fun and conflict of family dramas and boarding school life.

Where’s it from?

The author’s a true-blue Englishwoman (writing under a pen name), and the books are set in a fictionalised south coast countryside, written between the 1940s and the 1970s.

Three words: Relatable, exciting, nostalgic
Re-readable? For sure!

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Welcome back to the stacks!

I’ve been taking my time writing a post about the Marlow books, because there’s so much to say about them that it’s all quite daunting. Lacklustre books are easy to review, but where do you start with books that are excellent on every level, their tapestries of story so well-woven that you can barely find a loose thread to pick at?

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Antonia Forest’s Marlow family series is a fitting first review for this blog, since it’s one that’s definitely spent a long time hidden in the depths of the library stacks. 

I only discovered them thanks to my English Lit course on children’s 20th century fantasy, where the fifth book Peter’s Room was a set text (likely a much-loved book from my lecturers’ youth). Even then, they had to send away to a special publisher, Girls Gone By, to request a reprint for the class, and the series has since gone out of print again - even the stacks don’t have the full series, unless you request some interloans.

 

To tell the truth, I didn’t fall in love with Peter’s Room right away - probably because of the fact that it was jumping into the series mid-way through. (Though I admire the fact that Forest never holds her readers’ hands, instead trusting that we’re smart enough to suss out for ourselves who’s who and what’s what - these may be books about kids, but they’re certainly not just for kids.)

Peter’s Room is set during the snowy Christmas holidays at the Marlow farm, which begins with the discovery of an abandoned attic in an old barn. Industrious 15 year-old Peter soon transforms it into a hideaway where a gang of Marlow siblings and their friend/crush Patrick invent a fantasy world to roleplay in (like a proto-Dungeons and Dragons), inspired by the Brontes’ Gondal lands and the historical relics up in the attic. Out in the real world, there’s hunting and a Twelfth Night dance and a fuss about a party dress, interspersed with dramatic excerpts from the imaginary adventure plotline that the kids are living out in the attic, their alter-egos dabbling in all sorts of treachery and intrigue.

 

Once I’d gotten used to the leisurely pace and the long chapters (not to mention the super fun 1950s slang, which deserves a whole post of its own), the story and characters got well and truly stuck in my head. Wishing that characters could be your friends is probably the best response you could have to a story, and I felt that for all the Marlows, from full-of-bravado-but-scared-of-heights Peter to insufferable-yet-sympathetic baby-of-the-family Lawrie. The book has stayed on my shelf long after graduating, which prompted me to give the rest of the series a go - and I’m so glad I did.

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The quality of the writing is so good that after reading three of them this year, I’ve given up on a dozen other books because they couldn't match the standard set by Antonia Forest.

 

First it was the third book, Falconer’s Lure, in which 13 year-old Nicola - who’s usually the protagonist - takes up falconry with neighbour Patrick, and the rest of the family prepare for a sort of countryside talent show that involves everything from high-diving rivalries to the horrors of remembering your lines in a singing competition, culminating in a horse-riding show where Nicola goes up against a cheater with a vendetta who’s mistaken Nicola for her identical twin Lawrie … classic stuff. The falcons cause their own conflict too, always getting lost or into danger - and this book doesn’t shy away from dealing with death, either, whether animal or human. The plot of these books may sound a bit quaint or twee, but in style and substance they’re anything but.

 

Apparently Forest wrote this one because she wanted to write a pony book, but her publishers suggested choosing a different, less-overdone animal! It was a great idea, though - learning about the ancient art of falconry through Nicola is fascinating.

As an aside, you don’t have to read these books in order - it was fun to reread Peter’s Room and now know what the girls are referencing when they come home from boarding school buzzing about the fallout from End of Term. I wouldn’t really recommend starting with the first one, Autumn Term, however - it’s a bit tame compared to the others, as it was initially written as a stand-alone book.

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The Marlow books are unique in that they’re not just holiday-hijink or boarding school books, but both, with the more adventurous escapades happening in between the term-time books.

 

End of Term - book four - was next out of the stacks for me, and gave me vivid flashbacks to the time when school was your whole life and being snubbed for a role in the play in favour of someone who can’t act was the most unjust thing in the world. Antonia Forest writes the intricacies of relationships brilliantly - everyone is perfectly drawn, and the little interactions between them are fully realistic (and often very funny). There’s the painfully shy new girl, the conniving scouts leader, the quietly witty prefect, the hot-and-cold ‘best friend’, the fearsome form teacher, the impressionable first-years, the useless head girl, the netball team outcast, the clingy companion … Add in twin-swapping shenanigans, a dog rescue, and an overly-ambitious Christmas play, and you’ve got a heck of a lot of fun and drama ready to unfold - and that’s just a taste of what the gang gets up to in this book. Who knew a single term of school could be so thrilling?

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Then there’s the seventh installation, The Ready Made Family, which I liked much more than I was expecting. In this one, studious eldest daughter Karen suddenly drops out of Oxford to marry a man twice her age and moves back to the family farm with him and his three young children in tow, much to the shock of the rest of the Marlows.

 

What makes The Ready Made Family my possible favourite is that it shows Forest’s talent not only as a character writer or school stories author, but as an action writer.

 

 

As Nicola and Peter reluctantly take on babysitting duties for their new younger siblings-in-law, there’s three major ticking-timebomb setpieces where they court disaster: a sunken ship, a railroad near-miss, and an attempted kidnapping when one of the kids runs away and is found by her ‘uncle’. All three - especially the last one - are genuinely scary and masterfully suspenseful. I’m super keen to get my hands on The Thuggery Affair now, which is set over a single weekend where Peter, Lawrie, and Patrick foil some drug-smugglers.

 

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The Ready Made Family was written in the late ‘60s and, just like Tintin or The Simpsons, it's a great example of a ‘floating timeline’ - I love how they talk about colour TV and miniskirts even though they're technically still living in 1949 and the farm's only just been decommissioned as a WWII army base.

 

I've seen other people describe the Marlows as a ‘stiff upper-lip’ bunch, which is pretty accurate - there's one or two scenes where a kid gets hit by an adult and it’s brushed off as impolite but tolerable, which is quite disconcerting as a modern reader. That’s one of the strange things you get when reading books from a few generations back, although there's also more fun things like reading about how telegrams work, what to do if you get stranded at the wrong train stop pre-cellphones, or what the heck a Twelfth Night party is.

Another cool thing that adds touch of realism is the references to other works of literature - the Marlows argue over whether they're too young for Jane Austen, debate what happens at the end of Childe Roland, make fun of lame poems, and have in-jokes about childhood books that I've never even heard of. Sometimes Forest even pokes fun at the genre by having characters imagine what might happen if they were in a novel, before shaking their heads and reminding themselves that this is ‘real life’.

 

If I was British myself, maybe I’d have stronger feelings about the vague classism in these books (the Marlows eventually acquire a cook, a maid, and several horses), but as a New Zealander these aspects seem more like just an interesting part of a far-off long-ago world.

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Lastly, I’ve got to mention Antonia Forest's skill at dialogue and description. Half the time, she doesn't even use dialogue tags - that’s how easy it is to tell who’s talking, where they are, and what they're feeling. It’s incredibly succinct. But when she needs to, she’ll give us an evocative description of a lonely moonlit field or clattering dining hall to give the scenes an extra breath of life. Another thing done very well is the setting - you can imagine exactly where everything is in the landscape and in the Marlow house.

I also love how Forest describes people’s thoughts and inner lives, in ways that are so simple yet so universally relatable. Journalist Lucy Mangan put it perfectly when she said ‘When I first came across CS Lewis’s adage, ‘I read to know that I am not alone’, it was the Marlows I thought of’. Judging by the collection of other wonderful reviews, in print and online, I'm not alone in my belief that Antonia Forest deserves to be more widely appreciated beyond the smallish circle of us lucky enough to have found her books.

These are one of the few books that I recommend to anyone, no matter whether or not you have a particular fondness for British kids’ books. It’s simply fantastic writing and fantastic characters, and you won’t regret letting these stories set up a home in your head.