snowmaiden wrote: There is a conversation between two of the mistresses - possibly Miss Wilmot and AN other? - when they are discussing what makes the early teens 'such a difficult time', and they say 'it's because one is neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring'. A bit cheesy perhaps but quite neat. And I wish I could be more specific about which book it's in but all my CS books are currently in boxes.
Agree about the age gap in Inter V, they can't all have gelled very well.
Actually it's a conversation between the prefects rather than mistresses and it's in Excitements:
Quote: “Well, I don’t know what the rest of you think, but it strikes me that it behoves us to sit up and take a little more notice of Inter V than we’ve done, so far. It’s quite bad enough having imps in the Fourths and Thirds without having to tackle the same among the Fifths.”
Lesley Bethune spoke. “The trouble is,” she said, “that actually, they’re neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red herring—by which I mean they’re hardly Seniors and yet they’re a little beyond Middles—most of them, anyway—and it’s a muddling position to be in. They don’t know what to make of themselves and if we don’t look out, we’re not going to know what to make of them, either.”
Her clan listened to her with respect. Lesley was a silent creature for the most part, but she was a thinker and when she did talk, her crowd had got into the habit of listening to her. Mary-Lou went as deeply as she—in some ways deeper; but she was a chatterer, too, though they were all ready to listen to her. On this occasion, Elinor turned to the first Library prefect to ask, “What do you think, Mary-Lou? Is that what’s likely to be the trouble?”
Mary-Lou had been regarding Lesley thoughtfully. “Yes,” she said, in reply to Elinor’s query. “I think Lesley’s got at a lot of the truth. But I also think we’ll have to go further than that.”
“In what way?” It was Madge who asked this.
“Well, some of them have come on a good deal since the beginning of last term and are beginning to take a more—more—adult stand. It’s a terribly mixed form. I don’t believe,” she added with a sudden rush of inspiration, “that we can possibly lump them all together and treat them all the same way. You get girls like Jo Scott and Rosamund Lilley who look at things from—well, from our point of view, more or less. And then you get people like Margot Maynard and Heather Clayton who are still Middles in their outlook and likely to remain so for a while yet. If you ask me, it’s a difficult form and we’ll have to move carefully where they’re concerned—especially,” she added with a sudden grin, “when you remember that they’ve also got Yseult Pertwee who fancies herself grown-up and who can behave in a thoroughly kiddish way.”
The young faces round the table in the prefects room were very grave as they listened to their other oracle. Sybil looked at Lesley.
“Do you agree, Lesley?” she asked.
Lesley nodded. “Every time! If you notice, you’ll see that they aren’t a united form. They’re broken up into little cliques all the way through. They’ve had a whole term to grow together, but I haven’t seen any sign of its happening so far. Oh, I know it’s too early in the term to say definitely yet. We haven’t been back a full week. But that’s how it struck me at the end of last term and I haven’t seen anything to show that they’re any different this.”
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I leave the kind of kiss to your imagination!
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