REREADING: Pam Plays Doubles
Mar. 17th, 2010 07:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllPam Plays Doubles: Jean MacGibbon Constable 1962
I bought this years ago for 10p in a charity shop. I only remembered the story vaguely and picked it up for a reread because of the tennis theme. It's not a great book, although I liked the detail on the tennis and it was a quick read!
Pam Marsh is an only child about to begin her second term, the summer term, in the fourth form of Hilverstone High School – the town’s day school for girls. She and her parents moved down south to the town where her mother grew up because of asthmatic Mrs Marsh’s chest problems. Pam is excited about being able to play tennis, although she soon learns that she was taught in an old-fashioned way at her old school, but she clearly loves the game, has talent and is discovered to be a born match player.
Pam’s tennis ability is dragged into an old feud between Pam’s best friend at Hilverstone, the effervescent Jess, and their classmate Shirley, a good tennis player, but a girl who's more interested in boys than schoolwork, something of a fantasist and who treats Pam as an enemy. Not used to hanging out with people her own age, a touch self-conscious anyway and very much at an age where her world and her grasp of it is constantly changing, Pam hates Shirley's snide comments, especially as she realises that the crux of the issue is her friendship with Jess’s nice older brother Steve, who offers to coach her in tennis. As she tries to work out whether he is her boyfriend or a friend who’s a boy, and what she wants him to be, what she wants to do later on in life and improve her tennis, another tennis player, an American exchange student called Lex, offers another view point altogether (unlike Steve, he gets a kiss from Pam, although she thinks of him as needing ‘mothering’). Lex and Pam end up rescuing Steve and Shirley from a random cave-in. Shirley learns not to be a bully and because Shirley is in a cast, Pam and Steve get to play doubles together at an important tournament. And they win.
The story is better when it focuses on the tennis, as perhaps the publishers would have been delighted with (on the back, the book is touted as being part of the ‘Sports Fiction Series’ and on the frontspiece this is referred to as Sports Fiction for Girls). It can get a bit technical over the tennis, but I liked being in Pam's head as she was figuring out her matches. Having said that, I was thrown by the scoring systems – the sets were best of ten games. When did that change? And there's no mention of deuce and advantage courts.
Written and set in the sixties, boys and what they think of girls and what girls think of them are important to these fourth formers (a few decades ago, at that age, they'd be chums and that would be that). Pam is both old-fashioned and acting her age when she tries to dampen down the boy craziness. But the only person to encourage Pam to be a nurse, something she blurted out because she thinks that taking care of people’s health is a wonderful career because of her mother’s ill-health, is a teacher. Nobody else is too concerned yet, although quite a few characters seem to be assuming marriage and settling down in a few years time. The older Steve wants to be a doctor and is noisily supported in this by his family, but both he and Pam love and are good at tennis (and Steve certainly has a gift for coaching) but that is not, of course, something for them to think of as a career. Come to think of it, the story has some similarities with the Trebizon series. I wonder if Anne Digby ever read this. And there’s a series I should hunt up and reread too.
PPD seems to be a lot of elements thrown together – sports! School rivalry! Coy love quadrangle! Sheltered girl starts to take steps outside her family! Life-threatening accident/rescue! – but not quite successfully synthesised. And I think it has more to do with the writer than the time that it’s set. I’ve seen this coming of age type of thing done better, it’s not so much the coyness about romance and growing up (the title refers to Pam's relationship with Steve, but also her learning to interact with others in general and not be a solo player...in life), but it suffers from a lack of specificity: a better writer would have left a more distinct impression of the trip to Wimbledon, for instance. Of course, it could also be that there was a lack of personal connection to the material - that MacGibbon was asked to write a Sports Story for Girls focusing on tennis.
I found
this marvellous list of tennis-centric novels at Tennis Collectables (and the price they’re charging for PPD makes me hug myself with glee). They mainly seem to be for children/teenagers and murder mystery/thrillers. I think the only other one I own is the Nancy Drew Case Files book.
I believe that this is the obituary of the same Jean MacGibbon (which is certainly food for thought as some of it contradicts my impressions based on PPD, while some of it supports them.)
Edited for typos at 18/2/11.
I bought this years ago for 10p in a charity shop. I only remembered the story vaguely and picked it up for a reread because of the tennis theme. It's not a great book, although I liked the detail on the tennis and it was a quick read!
Pam Marsh is an only child about to begin her second term, the summer term, in the fourth form of Hilverstone High School – the town’s day school for girls. She and her parents moved down south to the town where her mother grew up because of asthmatic Mrs Marsh’s chest problems. Pam is excited about being able to play tennis, although she soon learns that she was taught in an old-fashioned way at her old school, but she clearly loves the game, has talent and is discovered to be a born match player.
Pam’s tennis ability is dragged into an old feud between Pam’s best friend at Hilverstone, the effervescent Jess, and their classmate Shirley, a good tennis player, but a girl who's more interested in boys than schoolwork, something of a fantasist and who treats Pam as an enemy. Not used to hanging out with people her own age, a touch self-conscious anyway and very much at an age where her world and her grasp of it is constantly changing, Pam hates Shirley's snide comments, especially as she realises that the crux of the issue is her friendship with Jess’s nice older brother Steve, who offers to coach her in tennis. As she tries to work out whether he is her boyfriend or a friend who’s a boy, and what she wants him to be, what she wants to do later on in life and improve her tennis, another tennis player, an American exchange student called Lex, offers another view point altogether (unlike Steve, he gets a kiss from Pam, although she thinks of him as needing ‘mothering’). Lex and Pam end up rescuing Steve and Shirley from a random cave-in. Shirley learns not to be a bully and because Shirley is in a cast, Pam and Steve get to play doubles together at an important tournament. And they win.
The story is better when it focuses on the tennis, as perhaps the publishers would have been delighted with (on the back, the book is touted as being part of the ‘Sports Fiction Series’ and on the frontspiece this is referred to as Sports Fiction for Girls). It can get a bit technical over the tennis, but I liked being in Pam's head as she was figuring out her matches. Having said that, I was thrown by the scoring systems – the sets were best of ten games. When did that change? And there's no mention of deuce and advantage courts.
Written and set in the sixties, boys and what they think of girls and what girls think of them are important to these fourth formers (a few decades ago, at that age, they'd be chums and that would be that). Pam is both old-fashioned and acting her age when she tries to dampen down the boy craziness. But the only person to encourage Pam to be a nurse, something she blurted out because she thinks that taking care of people’s health is a wonderful career because of her mother’s ill-health, is a teacher. Nobody else is too concerned yet, although quite a few characters seem to be assuming marriage and settling down in a few years time. The older Steve wants to be a doctor and is noisily supported in this by his family, but both he and Pam love and are good at tennis (and Steve certainly has a gift for coaching) but that is not, of course, something for them to think of as a career. Come to think of it, the story has some similarities with the Trebizon series. I wonder if Anne Digby ever read this. And there’s a series I should hunt up and reread too.
PPD seems to be a lot of elements thrown together – sports! School rivalry! Coy love quadrangle! Sheltered girl starts to take steps outside her family! Life-threatening accident/rescue! – but not quite successfully synthesised. And I think it has more to do with the writer than the time that it’s set. I’ve seen this coming of age type of thing done better, it’s not so much the coyness about romance and growing up (the title refers to Pam's relationship with Steve, but also her learning to interact with others in general and not be a solo player...in life), but it suffers from a lack of specificity: a better writer would have left a more distinct impression of the trip to Wimbledon, for instance. Of course, it could also be that there was a lack of personal connection to the material - that MacGibbon was asked to write a Sports Story for Girls focusing on tennis.
I found
this marvellous list of tennis-centric novels at Tennis Collectables (and the price they’re charging for PPD makes me hug myself with glee). They mainly seem to be for children/teenagers and murder mystery/thrillers. I think the only other one I own is the Nancy Drew Case Files book.
I believe that this is the obituary of the same Jean MacGibbon (which is certainly food for thought as some of it contradicts my impressions based on PPD, while some of it supports them.)
Edited for typos at 18/2/11.
