Also I am not tooo comfortable with the ethics of lying to a patient about her condition in order to get her to rest, and keeping her unnecessarily in what must have been a really uncomfortable back plaster when she didn't need to be.

Oh, and this is the book where Cornelia says that while she likes her own children, Joey's have 'something extra'!

So, did you like this book? This is the one that EBD wrote because she'd forgotten that it was the 50th book in the series and therefore something of an anniversary. Chambers harried her on to write this and released it instead of the already-prepared Jane. Can you tell?

(That proposal is unforgiveable, though, as is the line 'He silenced her firmly' - which I'm assuming is via a kiss, rather than a gag!)

I was fascinated by the dustjacket which showed Joey and a crowd of other people. The library copy I read had lost its dustjacket so never did discover who everyone else was.

I'm a bit concerned at the way Miss Annersley looks like the actress who played the horrible Mrs Elton in Emma. (Juliet Stevenson?)

Which Emma? It was Harriet Walter, I think, in one (I think the one with drippy Gwyneth Paltrow) - I don't know the name of the actress who played Mrs Elton from the Kate Beckinsale one, though she looked vaguely familiar. Though Juliet Stevenson would be wonderful.

It was the one with Gwyneth P. I didn't know there was a Kate Beckinsale one - must look it out. (Sorry, totally OT!)

no one as illustrated looks remotely the way I'd imagined

Bit like meeting people you've only ever known online...

To get back on topic, there's something I'm slightly confused about, especially as, while I find the cover funny and appealing, no one as illustrated looks remotely the way I'd imagined, and I have some imaginative difficulty with the deeply 1950s physiques on offer - who annotated the Reunion cover?

...Hair was still often rather set even then, even if we backcombed it rather a lot, mostly so we could hide the hated school berets under the backcombing...

How do you hide a beret under backcombed hair, Jan?

The Mistress of Sport (yes, that was her title!) in my school was a young - no ,more than 28, nervy and neurotic nun, who obviously suffered appallingly from religious scruples. She insisted that the hockey team wore divided skirts below the knee. She would have the girls kneel down so that she could see the skirts touch the ground. There was one very old but fabulous nun, who had, some thirty years before, been Mistress of Sport and who was light years ahead of her time. One day when the team was getting ready for a match and Mother Droopy Skirts was raging on as usual about skirt lengths, she marched in and roared "Hitch those skirts up girls! Up, I say. They should be at least 6 inches above your knees or you'll look like a set of eegits!"

She does seem to become very institutionalised in that her life revolves around the School and the other Old Girls who live nearby.

...perhaps why she is so insistent on Len marrying Reg? It would keep one of her daughters close.

Sorry to take an issue with this, but quite a few people seem to see Joey as pushing Len into her engagement and I don't see why! Joey is fond of Reg and would love for him to be part of her family, I think, but she also likes to keep her daughters young, as we're told, and seems very supportive of Len's wish to go to university and teach afterwards. When she says to Len that often-quoted "Don't play fast and loose with him" it's because Len, who has never outwardly shown herself to be keen on Reg is now saying that she is - to me, it seems like Joey is worried that Len's infatuation is caused over her worry for Reg and won't last, which would be an upsetting outcome for all involved.

I can see why she'd want that same kind of "safety" for Len.

I can guess the response that I shall get for this *shelters behind Bruno* but as a young girl myself, it would pretty much be all of my dreams coming true if someone clever and interesting, who my parents liked and who loved me proposed to me - I can see what Len is thinking. After all, she has no guarantees either that Reg won't change his mind, and she does seem to truly love him.

Oh, I can quite understand what Len was thinking. And she has the example of her own mother who married an old family friend who was several years her senior and has been very happy. It's everyone else's actions I have trouble with. Jo, with her 'fast and loose' remarks, implying that Len must make up her mind immediately. Why couldn't Jo have advised Len to take her time?

... It would be much more healthy for them to develop a brother-sister relationship - it would have been lovely for Len to have someone like that to unburden herself to when she felt overwhelmed by school/family responsibility...

ps Dad hated the name Reg but it was better than his other name Lawrence and anyhow most people called him Bill from his surname Willsher.

Am I wrong in also thinking that Con looks like she is being lined up for some handsome young climber they bump into on an excursion?

Joey went straight to the point. “Is it the real thing, Len?”

Len nodded. “Yes, I found that out when Reg went missing. I don't want to be married yet. I want my college course. A degree is a useful sort of thing to have, particularly in these days. Once I've got that if Reg still wants me then I'm his.”

“What do you mean exactly by that?” Jo demanded. Then she added, “Mind you, Len! You're not going on playing fast and loose with that poor boy.” [my italics]

“I don't mean to,” Len said. “If nothing else will satisfy him, I'll be engaged. But I won't be married at once.”

“I should think not!” her mother exclaimed. “You don't get married until you've graduated and that's that!”

“All right, that's understood. And now, Mamma, please let me see him.”

Ian Hamilton, the young doctor who is on the boat with Neil Sheppard, and accompanies him to Switzerland, notices Con, and, I think, remarks that she's pretty.

Ian Hamilton was a UK literary critic/poet/biographer/journalist who would have been at Keble, Oxford at roughly the right time to meet Con

And I agree with the comment that Len wasn't really very mature - she was responsible, certainly, and had common sense, I think, but she was hardly very worldly.

"He[Reg]'s hinted to me once or twice that he finds our young Len more than attractive ... Len isn't seventeen yet ... she likes boys all right as chums but as far as I know, she hasn't begun to think of them in any other light ... looking forward to Oxford and teaching. She really does want to do that, you know."

"Well, don't tell anyone I've told you, but last Sunday Reg and Jack had a talk. Reg, it seems, wanted to know if we'd mind if he spoke to her in a year or two's time ... She certainly isn't ready for anything of that kind at the moment ... Jack made him promise to say nothing to her until her schooldays ended."

"If he makes good in it [his job] and she cares enough, there's no reason why they shouldn't make a go of it later on. But she hasn't met a lot of boys yet and she ought to before she comes to a final decision."

but I just always feel very uncomfortable about Len and Reg - and every time Reg's name is mentioned on the Board everyone expresses strong opinions on the subject, in a way that doesn't really happen with any other engagement/marriage in the series.

Since we're discussing Reunion, and it's one of my favourites, my first impression of the scene between Joey, Mollie and Grizel about Len's future was positive . I found it quite intruiguing that EBD was planning ahead for the triplets. Reg is nice if abit colourless in this book,and I looked forward to more character development later. I quite fancied Ian Hamiltion for Con, although Roger Richardson appears to be odds on favourite in recent drabbles, and thats good too. I like the fact that EBD introduces the idea of boyfriends and romances for the Maynards at an age when most girls would be thinking along those lines. She retains their innocence of course, it is the coarse males who fancy them rather than the other way round, but that's the usual order in GO lit.

That assumes a very different definition of "mature" than EBD's, who would read "worldly" maturity as "superficial" and not necessarily desirable -- the sort of thing Margot might pick up in Canada. "Mature" would imply being prepared and willing to accept the responsibilities of adulthood, not a loss of naiveté. If, once she's finishes her degree, Len still wants what she's effectively job shadowed for quite some time, I'd say she's far better prepared for her profession than the average graduate. It's a perfectly valid route to a happy, fulfilled and useful life.

“The blame is not yours. They are all old enough to know that if you did not take them it was because something had prevented it. All such promises, as they should know, are conditional on your having permission, and if they had taken the trouble to think for five minutes, they would have realised it. So should you. Go away, Len, and please try to overcome this absurd scrupulosity of yours.”

Con, black-haired and brown-eyed; and Margot, youngest of the three, and certainly with the most showy looks in the family, with red-gold curls, brilliantly blue eyes and a complexion of milk-and-roses.

The bit about Margot's "showy" good looks has made me wonder: did this have any bearing on her decision to become a nun? In the sense that (in CS-world)

There's always been a tradition that the wildest or boldest girl in the class or family becomes the nun.

If the CS had been made into a movie I think a teenage Hayley would have made a good Margot.

He know Janet cared for him now, and he know that for his part he would never cease to care for her, though he was determined not to bind her in any way.

There is definitely a difference with Jo marrying young. For one thing she had left school, returned as a teacher and started her writing career before the whole War escape scenario.

OK, I would also point out that her method of dealing with potentially, and actually difficult characters, including Margot and Jack Lambert, leaves a LOT to be desired. And that's something EBD would definitely (IMO anyway) have seen as a lack of maturity of the 'right' sort.

Going over old ground, it is not so much the fact that Len gets engaged at school, though I grant it is in itself an issue, but it is the sterility of the relationship itself. There isn't a spark between them, not even the comfortable old comradeship that Jo and Jack shared as a prologue to their engagement.

To some extent Eugen von und zu Wertheim is the same - surely he could have waited another few months, until Marie had at least left school - but I never feel uneasy about that because it's so obviously what Marie wants.

The Head’s words had settled for her a question which had been on the nebulous side with her till then. Now she knew where her future seemed likely to lie.

I've never been keen on Reg, although it's partly because I read CGGU before any of the CS books he appeared in

....no relationship is happy, no one is fulfilled, and huge numbers of characters seem to end up ill, dead, desperate, betrayed, or broke - sometimes all at once!

Reading some of the responses to this thread has made me think: most people here are casting Len in the role of saintly, people-pleasing, inexperienced, young-fogey (or variations on those sorts of themes). I'm fairly sure that's not the way EBD intended her to be read... I'd hazard that she was intended to be a strong-minded characterful, and intelligent young woman by the end of the series, a bit like OOAO, but less bumptious, perhaps.
Where did it all go wrong?

A lot of it is Jack and Joey's fault, too: Len is cast in the role of responsible eldest daughter from very early on, and maybe that's why we never see her as a mischievous Middle like Joey was or someone who'd argue with Phil Craven in the middle of a school meeting like Mary-Lou did, and because of that we never feel like we see her personality develop, if you know what I mean.

I don't think that the problem is that she's responsible, I think that the problem is that all she is is responsible. I was trying to think of EBD's other Responsible Eldest Daughter characters and the one that really stands out for me is Peggy who to me suffers from the same problem. Peggy is reliable, responsible, and doesn't even have the same flash of temper that Len very occasionally shows. I like Peggy, but in some ways she's a very boring heroine.

I think part of the trouble with Len is that she isn't a strong enough character to be a heroine