REVIEW: Flowering Spring
Dec. 15th, 2023 07:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllFlowering Spring: Elfrida Vipont. Oxford University Press, 1960
I wish I’d read the books in this continuity in order. I read ‘The Lark in the Morn’ a while ago, and there are two books and several years between that and this. I was very muddled while I read the first few chapters as a result. We meet Laura, Kate, Peter and Christopher at St Merlyon, and it took a while for me to work out how they were connected (Laura and Chris are siblings) and who their relations were. In fact, I’m still not sure I could explain Laura’s family. I rather wish a family tree had been supplied at the end. So, I’d strongly recommend trying to read these books in order. (I increasingly make a point of it, but it’s difficult with second hand books.)
It gradually became obvious that the book’s heroine is Laura Haverard. She lives in the northern village of St Merlyon (the kind of place where the Quakers go to the Friends House in the morning, but attend the Priory church on a Sunday evening.) At the start of the book, she must be about fifteen years old, and a young fifteen at that. Kate is her more sensible best friend, Chris her younger brother, who Laura tries to keep in his place, but he will not be bossed by her, yet both will back each other fiercely against anyone else, and Peter is a friend who appears the least of these four in the story, but has quite an impact every time he does appear.
Before Laura and Chris come three sisters: twins Chenda and Pippa, who seem flighty but are now going to university to study social science. Then there’s Mary, who, unlike Laura, passed her eleven plus and seems to be the only child likely to follow their father, Professor Haverard’s academic pursuits. But he won’t see that. Laura thinks he’s unfair for refusing to take her desire to go on the stage seriously, insisting she tries for more GCE’s than anyone else at her secondary modern and then sending her to the Quaker boarding school that the twins (and earlier Kit, I vaguely recall from ‘The Lark in the Morn’) attended with a view to her becoming a teacher.
Worse, he plays favourites, which can’t be good for either Mary or the less favoured children, although the twins have each other and laugh him off, while Laura and Chris are grouped together by simply not being Mary. Professor Haverard’s prejudices and blindness are particularly harmful for Chris. He insists that his son be tutored to get into a good boarding school and once there concentrates on subjects of which he approves, while Chris is clearly not academic (he passes the entrance exam more by accident than anything) and more interested in farming. This is all while Chris is hitting puberty. His behaviour deteriorates because of his unhappiness, while his father insists he’s doing everything for his only son’s good, with calamitous results.
That isn’t handled overdramatically, and Richard Haverard comes to learn (the hard way) not to force his children to be what they are not. Laura even reaches a point where she wants to make him proud of her. (I think I was less tolerant of Richard Haverard than the author.) The children’s mother Syliva is more loving and understanding, but she’s not the one who stands up to her husband when he isn’t acting in his children’s best interests.
Before that, I wondered, like Laura’s Cousin Milly, a successful professional actress, whether Laura was just a stage-struck teenager. She is childish and a dreamer, with some talent, but she makes rookie mistakes. At Heryot, the headmistress tells her, as most adults do, that acting is a precarious, overcrowded profession, but her timetable is arranged in a sensible way. Having got used to playing the lead, as a new girl and unknown quantity, she has to take on a supporting role in the school play. But at the hands of a demanding producer and by growing up a little, she learns more about what it takes to build a character and how stepping aside from ego can help the integrity of a play. (She remains oblivious about some things, mainly boys and romance.)
The repetitive names (children are named after family members) didn’t help with my muddles, and the subplot involving Tim, a village friend, is a bit repetitive, but Vipont is good on village life and what the Priory means to Laura and what they both give her, which she repays. The made-up place names are also pretty decent. Loyalty is a strong theme. Kate passed the eleven-plus, but it’s Laura who leaves the village, first for a new school and then further afield, making new friends, but Kate will always be her best friend. There’s also a sense that adults are fallible, complex beings – from Cousin Milly to the unexpected new aunt Rachel, to new headteachers that you come across when you move schools. And there were a few sophisticated theatrical allusions, but Shirley Hughes’s illustrations did nothing for me.
I wish I’d read the books in this continuity in order. I read ‘The Lark in the Morn’ a while ago, and there are two books and several years between that and this. I was very muddled while I read the first few chapters as a result. We meet Laura, Kate, Peter and Christopher at St Merlyon, and it took a while for me to work out how they were connected (Laura and Chris are siblings) and who their relations were. In fact, I’m still not sure I could explain Laura’s family. I rather wish a family tree had been supplied at the end. So, I’d strongly recommend trying to read these books in order. (I increasingly make a point of it, but it’s difficult with second hand books.)
It gradually became obvious that the book’s heroine is Laura Haverard. She lives in the northern village of St Merlyon (the kind of place where the Quakers go to the Friends House in the morning, but attend the Priory church on a Sunday evening.) At the start of the book, she must be about fifteen years old, and a young fifteen at that. Kate is her more sensible best friend, Chris her younger brother, who Laura tries to keep in his place, but he will not be bossed by her, yet both will back each other fiercely against anyone else, and Peter is a friend who appears the least of these four in the story, but has quite an impact every time he does appear.
Before Laura and Chris come three sisters: twins Chenda and Pippa, who seem flighty but are now going to university to study social science. Then there’s Mary, who, unlike Laura, passed her eleven plus and seems to be the only child likely to follow their father, Professor Haverard’s academic pursuits. But he won’t see that. Laura thinks he’s unfair for refusing to take her desire to go on the stage seriously, insisting she tries for more GCE’s than anyone else at her secondary modern and then sending her to the Quaker boarding school that the twins (and earlier Kit, I vaguely recall from ‘The Lark in the Morn’) attended with a view to her becoming a teacher.
Worse, he plays favourites, which can’t be good for either Mary or the less favoured children, although the twins have each other and laugh him off, while Laura and Chris are grouped together by simply not being Mary. Professor Haverard’s prejudices and blindness are particularly harmful for Chris. He insists that his son be tutored to get into a good boarding school and once there concentrates on subjects of which he approves, while Chris is clearly not academic (he passes the entrance exam more by accident than anything) and more interested in farming. This is all while Chris is hitting puberty. His behaviour deteriorates because of his unhappiness, while his father insists he’s doing everything for his only son’s good, with calamitous results.
That isn’t handled overdramatically, and Richard Haverard comes to learn (the hard way) not to force his children to be what they are not. Laura even reaches a point where she wants to make him proud of her. (I think I was less tolerant of Richard Haverard than the author.) The children’s mother Syliva is more loving and understanding, but she’s not the one who stands up to her husband when he isn’t acting in his children’s best interests.
Before that, I wondered, like Laura’s Cousin Milly, a successful professional actress, whether Laura was just a stage-struck teenager. She is childish and a dreamer, with some talent, but she makes rookie mistakes. At Heryot, the headmistress tells her, as most adults do, that acting is a precarious, overcrowded profession, but her timetable is arranged in a sensible way. Having got used to playing the lead, as a new girl and unknown quantity, she has to take on a supporting role in the school play. But at the hands of a demanding producer and by growing up a little, she learns more about what it takes to build a character and how stepping aside from ego can help the integrity of a play. (She remains oblivious about some things, mainly boys and romance.)
The repetitive names (children are named after family members) didn’t help with my muddles, and the subplot involving Tim, a village friend, is a bit repetitive, but Vipont is good on village life and what the Priory means to Laura and what they both give her, which she repays. The made-up place names are also pretty decent. Loyalty is a strong theme. Kate passed the eleven-plus, but it’s Laura who leaves the village, first for a new school and then further afield, making new friends, but Kate will always be her best friend. There’s also a sense that adults are fallible, complex beings – from Cousin Milly to the unexpected new aunt Rachel, to new headteachers that you come across when you move schools. And there were a few sophisticated theatrical allusions, but Shirley Hughes’s illustrations did nothing for me.
