REVIEW: The Rose Round
Sep. 14th, 2024 05:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllThe Rose Round: Meriol Trevor. Puffin, 1966
I see I’ve never posted about Meriol Trevor here! I first came across her books in the school library, and she’s unusual in that she’s an English Roman Catholic author in the second half of the twentieth century. She wrote for both children and adults, and I own books of both types by her, but clearly it’s been a long time since I bought any.
Nonetheless, the outline of ‘The Rose Round’ isn’t that unusual. A child goes to a stately home, Woodhall, owned by the Ayre family, where he meets another child of his age who is living a strictly restricted life under her grandmother’s rule. As Matt Rendal gets to know the family, the grounds and the rose garden that lends the book its title, he is part of a series of changes that brings the house back to a fuller life and some of the Ayres too. That’s not a new plot. But I’d argue that 13 year old Matt isn’t the hero of this book at all, it’s Theo Ayre, the man who owns Woodhall, for Matt doesn’t grow much as a character. As a catalyst and a handy eavesdropper, he’s almost a device for the author to write a romance that Matt only dimly realises is happening around him, but roots for.
I’ll try to disentangle that. We join Matt Rendal, on his way to join his stepsister Caro, fifteen years his senior. She has recently become a cook at Woodhall for the Ayre family. During term time, Matt lives in Birmingham, with a dreary aunt, who thinks he’s clumsy and slow and keeps telling him as much. Going out to ‘the middle of England’ (er, surely not if it’s near the Severn) to the mysterious, attractive Woodhall is quite a change. I did wonder whether Matt was as much touchy as he was put upon. He dislikes Caro’s posh fiancé Jasper. In a way, it's a shame that we’re told more than we’re shown about Matt and Caro’s relationship at the start of the book.
But there’s plenty to reveal about Woodhall. Caro is employed by Mrs Ayre, a white-haired matriarch known as ‘Madame’, for she is French and particular about how things are done. She has a grand-daughter, Alix, and, as we learn, a whole lot of prejudices. Matt is to stay away from certain parts of the house and garden while visiting, and most of all Alix. Well, that doesn’t last very long. Alix is lonely and bored, but Matt isn’t the type to put up with her parroting misandry about how he’s automatically rough as the cook’s brother, and starts to broaden Alix’s horizons. Both are orphaned, but Matt is richer in that his stepsister clearly loves him.
Apart from Alix’s nervous French governess, there’s a taciturn servant and a gossipy maid who comes to work daily. The grounds, particularly the forbidden rose garden, with four arches and a central fountain lacking its statue for tragic reasons Matt will learn, attract him very much. It is outdoors that he meets Mr Ayre, Madame’s only living child, the Theo she has disparagingly compared Matt to, so he feels a solidarity with the large man. Madame has never forgiven Theo for surviving, when her two older children did not, and being born with a disability (in one of his arms.) As we and Matt learn more about his upbringing, it seems pretty abusive. Madame has also not forgiven God for what He has done, and does not attend mass or visit the chapel her husband (a convert to Catholicism for her sake, and then of conviction) had built at Woodhall.
Despite being the owner of Woodhall, Theo barely lives there, having made a life for himself helping to run St Raphael, a school for disabled children, many of whom were equally ill-used at home. The school is gradually running out of money and needs a new home. Theo would love to offer Woodhall, but Madame, with her horror of ‘the disfigured’ and ‘the deformed’, is set against it.
And, of course, when Theo first claps eyes on beautiful Caro, he falls hard (I rolled my eyes at this), and is devastated to learn that she’s engaged. Matt has never taken to Jasper, who it turns out that, is related to the Ayres through his mother. Jasper has spent his whole life looking down on Theo, assuming he is dull and incapable, which Matt, at least, knows he is not. But Theo finds Jasper contemptible for not standing up to his snobbish father and his likely threat to cut the allowance if his son married, oh horrors, a cook, by marrying Caro at once. Matt approves of the resulting fistfight, where the larger Theo prevails, but Caro does not. (It does save Theo from being a total saint.) Theo had been developing a quiet friendship with Caro over shared interests like poetry and values, visiting the kitchen for coffee and less awful company than his mother.
Matt returns to Woodhall, holiday after holiday, but it is over Christmas that things really change. Theo has to bring three children from St Raphael to Woodhall, for they have nowhere else to go. Having acquired Caro’s agreement to take on the extra work, he resolutely tells his mother his plans, promising that the children will stay out of her way. Bernadette is a helpful, musical girl, with an ‘artificial arm’; Micky a mischievous soul, who uses a wheelchair; while Noel, the youngest, is perhaps babyish, but needs to be carried and helped a lot, as his disability is the most severe. Their company along with her established friendship with Matt makes Alix realise how lonely she’s been and how much fun she’s been missing out on, and she chafes against her grandmother’s diktats.
Madame’s sharp tongue has also caused difficulties for Theo and Caro, just after Caro broke off the engagement, finally realising that Julian cared more for money than her.
In the new year, more St Raphael children have to come to Woodhall. Madame has become ever more strict with Alix, despite Theo’s warnings that she will rebel, which the girl does, of course, leading to a chapter called ‘Danger in the Dark Night’ that changes everything, giving everyone a sharp lesson about what really matters. It is Matt who makes things right for Caro and Theo, both lovelorn and miserable, thus gaining a brother and the positive male influence he’s been lacking since his father died. Theo is the one who understands the mystic visions Matt has been having, influenced, perhaps, by designs left around the house by an ancestor of his, and the one who, having had to work through rejection and adversity from childhood, has had to think through others’ motivations for unkindness and gain enough understanding to reject bitterness. This makes him worthy of the beautiful (still eyerolling) and kind Caro, who had been kind-hearted enough to get engaged more than once previously, despite not really having loved until now. (Having said that, Trevor writes Theo as rather sexy in a way that completely escapes Matt and probably escaped the intended audience.)
I find Trevor’s sincere Catholicism interesting (although I may have muttered ‘Papist idolatry’ as she details how Catholic tradition weaved in the signs of the Zodiac). Everyone is conveniently Catholic in this book! Having thought about it, I suppose Mrs Ayre advertised the position of cook in some sort of Catholic magazine or whatnot. Madame yielding before God before facing Him is one of the book’s strands, while Caro and Matt’s faith makes them value everyone, whatever their class or physical state. The depiction of how disabled children were treated in the first half and middle of the twentieth century is eye-opening and dismaying. The word ‘cripple’ is used repeatedly. It was so interesting to be reading this during the Paralympic Games. But the almost mystic nature of Matt’s vivid dreams and visions is unique to Trevor.
Does she tell too much instead of showing? Yes. Is this a weird book given its likely audience? Well, yes, I thought so, but the blurb claims it ‘will give deep satisfaction to all children who are puzzled by the needless unhappiness the see in the world.' I suppose it has the possibility of doing so, for it faces the damage caused by favouritism, snobbishness and bullying. As well as that, it explores the discrimination of disabled people, a topic that’s rarely found in contemporaneous children’s literature. And it examines why people are cruel, showing that Madame, for instance, is motivated in part by grief, while never excusing her.
I see I’ve never posted about Meriol Trevor here! I first came across her books in the school library, and she’s unusual in that she’s an English Roman Catholic author in the second half of the twentieth century. She wrote for both children and adults, and I own books of both types by her, but clearly it’s been a long time since I bought any.
Nonetheless, the outline of ‘The Rose Round’ isn’t that unusual. A child goes to a stately home, Woodhall, owned by the Ayre family, where he meets another child of his age who is living a strictly restricted life under her grandmother’s rule. As Matt Rendal gets to know the family, the grounds and the rose garden that lends the book its title, he is part of a series of changes that brings the house back to a fuller life and some of the Ayres too. That’s not a new plot. But I’d argue that 13 year old Matt isn’t the hero of this book at all, it’s Theo Ayre, the man who owns Woodhall, for Matt doesn’t grow much as a character. As a catalyst and a handy eavesdropper, he’s almost a device for the author to write a romance that Matt only dimly realises is happening around him, but roots for.
I’ll try to disentangle that. We join Matt Rendal, on his way to join his stepsister Caro, fifteen years his senior. She has recently become a cook at Woodhall for the Ayre family. During term time, Matt lives in Birmingham, with a dreary aunt, who thinks he’s clumsy and slow and keeps telling him as much. Going out to ‘the middle of England’ (er, surely not if it’s near the Severn) to the mysterious, attractive Woodhall is quite a change. I did wonder whether Matt was as much touchy as he was put upon. He dislikes Caro’s posh fiancé Jasper. In a way, it's a shame that we’re told more than we’re shown about Matt and Caro’s relationship at the start of the book.
But there’s plenty to reveal about Woodhall. Caro is employed by Mrs Ayre, a white-haired matriarch known as ‘Madame’, for she is French and particular about how things are done. She has a grand-daughter, Alix, and, as we learn, a whole lot of prejudices. Matt is to stay away from certain parts of the house and garden while visiting, and most of all Alix. Well, that doesn’t last very long. Alix is lonely and bored, but Matt isn’t the type to put up with her parroting misandry about how he’s automatically rough as the cook’s brother, and starts to broaden Alix’s horizons. Both are orphaned, but Matt is richer in that his stepsister clearly loves him.
Apart from Alix’s nervous French governess, there’s a taciturn servant and a gossipy maid who comes to work daily. The grounds, particularly the forbidden rose garden, with four arches and a central fountain lacking its statue for tragic reasons Matt will learn, attract him very much. It is outdoors that he meets Mr Ayre, Madame’s only living child, the Theo she has disparagingly compared Matt to, so he feels a solidarity with the large man. Madame has never forgiven Theo for surviving, when her two older children did not, and being born with a disability (in one of his arms.) As we and Matt learn more about his upbringing, it seems pretty abusive. Madame has also not forgiven God for what He has done, and does not attend mass or visit the chapel her husband (a convert to Catholicism for her sake, and then of conviction) had built at Woodhall.
Despite being the owner of Woodhall, Theo barely lives there, having made a life for himself helping to run St Raphael, a school for disabled children, many of whom were equally ill-used at home. The school is gradually running out of money and needs a new home. Theo would love to offer Woodhall, but Madame, with her horror of ‘the disfigured’ and ‘the deformed’, is set against it.
And, of course, when Theo first claps eyes on beautiful Caro, he falls hard (I rolled my eyes at this), and is devastated to learn that she’s engaged. Matt has never taken to Jasper, who it turns out that, is related to the Ayres through his mother. Jasper has spent his whole life looking down on Theo, assuming he is dull and incapable, which Matt, at least, knows he is not. But Theo finds Jasper contemptible for not standing up to his snobbish father and his likely threat to cut the allowance if his son married, oh horrors, a cook, by marrying Caro at once. Matt approves of the resulting fistfight, where the larger Theo prevails, but Caro does not. (It does save Theo from being a total saint.) Theo had been developing a quiet friendship with Caro over shared interests like poetry and values, visiting the kitchen for coffee and less awful company than his mother.
Matt returns to Woodhall, holiday after holiday, but it is over Christmas that things really change. Theo has to bring three children from St Raphael to Woodhall, for they have nowhere else to go. Having acquired Caro’s agreement to take on the extra work, he resolutely tells his mother his plans, promising that the children will stay out of her way. Bernadette is a helpful, musical girl, with an ‘artificial arm’; Micky a mischievous soul, who uses a wheelchair; while Noel, the youngest, is perhaps babyish, but needs to be carried and helped a lot, as his disability is the most severe. Their company along with her established friendship with Matt makes Alix realise how lonely she’s been and how much fun she’s been missing out on, and she chafes against her grandmother’s diktats.
Madame’s sharp tongue has also caused difficulties for Theo and Caro, just after Caro broke off the engagement, finally realising that Julian cared more for money than her.
In the new year, more St Raphael children have to come to Woodhall. Madame has become ever more strict with Alix, despite Theo’s warnings that she will rebel, which the girl does, of course, leading to a chapter called ‘Danger in the Dark Night’ that changes everything, giving everyone a sharp lesson about what really matters. It is Matt who makes things right for Caro and Theo, both lovelorn and miserable, thus gaining a brother and the positive male influence he’s been lacking since his father died. Theo is the one who understands the mystic visions Matt has been having, influenced, perhaps, by designs left around the house by an ancestor of his, and the one who, having had to work through rejection and adversity from childhood, has had to think through others’ motivations for unkindness and gain enough understanding to reject bitterness. This makes him worthy of the beautiful (still eyerolling) and kind Caro, who had been kind-hearted enough to get engaged more than once previously, despite not really having loved until now. (Having said that, Trevor writes Theo as rather sexy in a way that completely escapes Matt and probably escaped the intended audience.)
I find Trevor’s sincere Catholicism interesting (although I may have muttered ‘Papist idolatry’ as she details how Catholic tradition weaved in the signs of the Zodiac). Everyone is conveniently Catholic in this book! Having thought about it, I suppose Mrs Ayre advertised the position of cook in some sort of Catholic magazine or whatnot. Madame yielding before God before facing Him is one of the book’s strands, while Caro and Matt’s faith makes them value everyone, whatever their class or physical state. The depiction of how disabled children were treated in the first half and middle of the twentieth century is eye-opening and dismaying. The word ‘cripple’ is used repeatedly. It was so interesting to be reading this during the Paralympic Games. But the almost mystic nature of Matt’s vivid dreams and visions is unique to Trevor.
Does she tell too much instead of showing? Yes. Is this a weird book given its likely audience? Well, yes, I thought so, but the blurb claims it ‘will give deep satisfaction to all children who are puzzled by the needless unhappiness the see in the world.' I suppose it has the possibility of doing so, for it faces the damage caused by favouritism, snobbishness and bullying. As well as that, it explores the discrimination of disabled people, a topic that’s rarely found in contemporaneous children’s literature. And it examines why people are cruel, showing that Madame, for instance, is motivated in part by grief, while never excusing her.
