REVIEW: Biddy Makes Her Mark
Jan. 14th, 2018 08:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllBiddy Makes Her Mark: Mary Gervaise, Nelson, 1956
This is a slim volume – well, I zipped through its hundred and teen pages – but a vivid story. Perhaps if it had been longer, I’d have run out of sympathy for its heroine, but as it is, Gervaise pulls it off.
The Nicholas family have just moved out of London to a town with a tidal river, because of Mr Nicholas’s work. The question is what eldest daughter Biddy will do. Fifteen, musical, sensitive, lazy and not at all sensible, her parents have decided school is over for her based on her school reports, but nobody quite knows what she could do next. Biddy doesn’t know what she wants to do and is developing a dread of the future. When her godmother comes up with a suggestion…it all goes wrong.
Biddy’s younger siblings, twins Sue and Dick (short for ‘Dictionary’!) are not surprised. There were mitigating circumstances that sensitive (and immature) Biddy declined to explain, something she has in common with A Term on Trial by the same author. Biddy doesn’t really learn her lesson when she gets the chance to help out at a daycare nursery. With plenty of willingness, no common sense and a colleague who doesn’t like her, her many failings get magnified until disaster strikes and Biddy is both self-sacrificingly brave and stupid.
Although she doesn’t think things through, Biddy is hyperaware that her mother worries about her, and this is what makes her appealing. She is very much a child, only a bigger one than the little ones she helps care for.
On the one hand, the characters come across a limited number of other characters – most of all in the ‘rival’ Kingston family, but Gervaise creates a believable social microcosm and family dynamic. I suppose it’s aimed at readers aged between biddy and the twins, written at a time when you must have been able to leave school before reaching 16, and sets out to reassure youngsters who fear change, showing that even the biggest dreamer can find something to do, and be useful and happy doing it.
This is a slim volume – well, I zipped through its hundred and teen pages – but a vivid story. Perhaps if it had been longer, I’d have run out of sympathy for its heroine, but as it is, Gervaise pulls it off.
The Nicholas family have just moved out of London to a town with a tidal river, because of Mr Nicholas’s work. The question is what eldest daughter Biddy will do. Fifteen, musical, sensitive, lazy and not at all sensible, her parents have decided school is over for her based on her school reports, but nobody quite knows what she could do next. Biddy doesn’t know what she wants to do and is developing a dread of the future. When her godmother comes up with a suggestion…it all goes wrong.
Biddy’s younger siblings, twins Sue and Dick (short for ‘Dictionary’!) are not surprised. There were mitigating circumstances that sensitive (and immature) Biddy declined to explain, something she has in common with A Term on Trial by the same author. Biddy doesn’t really learn her lesson when she gets the chance to help out at a daycare nursery. With plenty of willingness, no common sense and a colleague who doesn’t like her, her many failings get magnified until disaster strikes and Biddy is both self-sacrificingly brave and stupid.
Although she doesn’t think things through, Biddy is hyperaware that her mother worries about her, and this is what makes her appealing. She is very much a child, only a bigger one than the little ones she helps care for.
On the one hand, the characters come across a limited number of other characters – most of all in the ‘rival’ Kingston family, but Gervaise creates a believable social microcosm and family dynamic. I suppose it’s aimed at readers aged between biddy and the twins, written at a time when you must have been able to leave school before reaching 16, and sets out to reassure youngsters who fear change, showing that even the biggest dreamer can find something to do, and be useful and happy doing it.
