Cricket Term, chapters 10-12

[coughingbear]

The final section of the book - the Play, the Match, and the End. Just about in time, but my apologies that it's so late; long day at work and trouble with laptop.

Comments

[nnozomi]

I am always tickled by Miss Cromwell's phrasing to Nicola: something like "Miss Keith saw fit to tell me..." which suggests, to me, that Miss Cromwell feels the information flow between headmistress and staff is not all it might be.
Tangent to follow, fair warning: I am very fond of Miss Cromwell as a character--I think she'd have reduced me to indignant tears when I was Lower Fourth age, but I would have loved her as an older teenager. And I like the way she seems to enjoy Miranda's cheeky remarks rather than squashing them. (On Miranda's part, this reminds me of Miss Pym's take on Beau Nash, as someone whose well-to-do family background moves to speak to her form mistress as an equal.) I had a professor in grad school who was even fiercer, or at any rate more explosive, than Miss Cromwell, but who loved it on the rare occasions when someone got up the nerve to talk back (assuming that the backtalk was accompanied by proper preparation)... .

Wouldn't somebody like to write a fic showing Cricket Term from the point of view of the

[nnozomi]

Interesting that Miss Cromwell has immediately worked out the timing of it all - that Miss Keith said that one of the girls would have to leave because of financial problems, and Miss Cromwell has figured out that there must have been a letter telling Nicola that she was the one (or at least, telling Nicola about the problems - maybe she wondered why Lawrie wasn't also told, or if she was, why she wasn't making a huha about the possibility, if they were keeping it general about one of them needing to leave but not who). I wonder when Miss Keith said all this (in discussion about the Prosser perhaps? Did they ever really consider Nicola for that? Did they know it was Nicola who was worried about leaving - or just that one of them might, so giving it to Lawrie was, to them, just as good a solution?). I didn't think any of the staff knew that it was Nicola who'd been chosen to leave. I got the feeling that the discussion with Miss Keith must have been quite a while after the missed lesson, so making the connection between it all is

[ext_195770]

I suspect that Miss Cromwell is fully aware that if Lawrie had been told she were the one to leave, everyone would have heard about it.

[fengirl88]

SO TRUE.

The play - absolutely stupendous?

[buntyandjinx]

As a child, I took Nicola's evaluation at face value. As an adult, who's had to endure many of my offsprings' plays, I'm slightly more sceptical. Could a school like Kingscote (ie as discussed, not amazingly academic)*really* pull off a play as complex as The Tempest? So is this a school girl view? Reading Mr West's response "It was wonderfully well done" I see it as rather evasive, rather than stonking adult endorsement. I know Rowan was "madly impressed" and "it really did have something" but again - much as Rowan is glorified - she is only 18 and living on a farm without many cultural reference points.

Re: The play - absolutely stupendous?

[nineveh_uk]

"Wonderfully well done" could be entirely sincere without it actually being good by higher standards ;-)

I don't think Kingscote needs to be academic to pull off The Tempest - plenty of successful actors and directors are not academic. But I think the question that really matters is the directing. A lot of university student drama is awful because the directors don't know about directing, but if Kempe does know a bit, and is good at dealing with the child actors she's got, she might be able to come up with something that is pacey and engaging enough to hold the attention of an audience that isn't expecting much, especially if her leads can speak the verse reasonaby enough. Though ultimately it's school-story convention.

Re: The play - absolutely stupendous?

[ext_195770]

Interestingly, in Jenny Overton's The Nightwatch Winter (where both the style and the situation is so Forest I'm almost inclined to read it as pastiche (there's an earlier one - Creed Country - where we practically get a re-run of the stuck-on-Leeper's-Bluff incident, though it's a crumbling castle ruin not sea-cliffs) there's a play for some Christian festival - Shrove Tuesday or something - where the characters do sit around discussing whether they'e been assessed as "good for their age" and where it's not been a mad success, afterwards.

Re: The play - absolutely stupendous?

[nnozomi]

I like the Overton books--we should discuss them in more detail here at some point--and tend to feel that, while they do seem Forest-influenced, the general mood, and the personalities involved, are very different. (Sarah and Stephen might have started out as Nicola and Patrick, for instance, but are nothing like them in practice, and so on.)
At some point here, somebody (you?) did mention the realism of the uneven quality of the play in the Overton book as compared to Forest's "wonderfully well done" productions. I'm ambivalent on the point; the best production of "Much Ado about Nothing" that I've ever seen, for instance, was done by high school students with a high school English teacher as director. Some of the performances were forgettable, but the good ones were out of this world, partly through the "irreproducible" quality that amateur performances can sometimes have--when the people involved know that it might be their one chance ever to play the role. Miss Kempe seems to be good at casting, which could work for a lot.

Miranda and her mother

[coughingbear]

What do people make of this? Miranda always seems pretty unconcerned to me that her mother doesn't turn up, and I have read her 'automatically discounting at least half of this' to include her mother being sorry she missed it as well as her father's judgement of the play.

Re: Miranda and her mother

[fengirl88]

I read it as Miranda not believing for a moment her mother would be sorry she missed the play, but also being slightly sceptical about her father's praise.

Re: Miranda and her mother

[nnozomi]

(I seem to be talking a lot today, sorry

Re: Miranda and her mother

[antfan]

That's fascinating. But the one thing we know about Mrs W is she's very into refugee committees/Zionism. Would this interest in "causes" also fit with her being so into material success (especially as the Wests are still very wealthy even despite (or perhaps because) of Mr West's career choices)?

Ginty's lie.

[jackmerlin]

Although Ginty telling her friends that she had deliberately dived badly was an awful thing to do, I wonder how people view it?
The Kingscote/Marlowverse code of honour seems to suggest that you should never, ever cry in public. Her friends are banging on in the most insensitive way, and unlike Nicola in EOT Ginty doesn't have helpful Janice to distract them and make them leave her alone. So in desperation Ginty blurts out the first thing she can think of, which is intended as a joke, but is suddenly taken more seriously than she meant it. She clearly feels appalled and guilty, and she still feels bad about it in Attic Term. So far, so good, I've persuaded myself to feel nothing but sympathy for her; but, I then think what would Nicola have said or done in that situation, and all my sympathy dissolves. Partly because I don't think Nicola would want to cry over having performed badly, and even supposing she did, she would deal with it quite differently.

Re: Ginty's lie.

[sprog_63]

"I think it illustrates very well one of the flaws in Ginty's character: her tendency to romanticise, which actually keeps her from being the noble person she'd like to imagine she is."

In which she is rather like Lois ?

Re: Ginty's lie.

[jackmerlin]

She is also like Lois in that she is such an unreliable performer - liable to suffer from nerves or simply being off-form. Whereas Nicola, and Rowan, come across as very reliable consistent performers. Is that because both Ginty and Lois are interested in individual stardom - the diving, or in Lois' case wanting to be the star performer in any team she's in, whereas Nicola and Rowan want the team to do well? And if your motivation is for the team to win you are less likely to be so anxious about your own performance and less likely to be crippled by nerves.

Never explain, never apologize

[joyfully82]

The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations has "Never contradict, Never explain, Never apologize." attributed to John Arbuthnot Fisher 1841-1920. British naval officer and First Sea Lord.

Which would fit Nicola very well...

(Apparently in a letter to Times, 5 September 1919. Also has cross references with Disraeli "Never complain and never explain." and Elbert Hubbard "Never explain-your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.")

Re: Never explain, never apologize

[ext_195770]

If that quote's Jackie Fisher's, then it's got to go up there as "most un-self-aware comment" since Ginty said whatever it was to prompt Rowan to comment, "My dear girl, have you looked at yourself recently?"