The Farm School Trilogy

I was writing recently about Josephine Elder and what a cold fish I found her. When I read that shocking line in The Encircled Heart about the ‘idiot boys’ who wouldn’t die and leave their mother free, I knew there was a similar comment in one of the Farm School books. No amount of flipping through would yield the quote I wanted, so I re-read the whole lot. Not a hardship.

We meet the main character in Exile for Annis. She’s been ill, her parents have to go abroad and, to her horror, she’s told she’s going to what she thinks of as a ‘crank school’ in the country. Until then, Annis has been a High School (GPDST) girl, as Elder herself was. Annis is happy at her big school and never questions its mores. The Farm School is in Kent and run by Mr and Mrs Forester, both academically qualified and combining teaching with farming and raising a large family. The ethos is liberal in that there are no compulsory games or activities but tough in insisting that everyone pulls their weight and always does their best at whatever skill they happen to have. Luckily for Annis, she finds that she loves the country and she quickly becomes friends with Kitty Forester. She’s a quicksilver girl, a brilliant musician and very different from sensible, rational Annis. Interesting that Elder was tiny physically and so often makes her heroines such strapping lasses.

Annis boards with the local doctor and is slightly hurt that she’s not encouraged to spend more time at the farmhouse with her friend. One day she opens the door into a walled garden and meets Kenneth, the ‘idiot boy’. He’s much luckier than Dr Marion’s patients in that his parents can afford care for him and have the space to let him spend most of his time in a garden. Annis takes to him and it’s emphasized that he seems happier than most ‘normal’ people. By the end of the book it’s explained why the Foresters were not keen for Annis to know about him, so that at last she can feel one of the family. When her parents ask her if she’d like to go back to her old school, she begs to be allowed to stay on the farm.
( the other two )