Poor Bilgewater, convinced that she's slow and lumpy and looks like
a toad, terrified to the point of flight by the simplest social
interaction, associating only with the housekeeper, her abstracted
scholarly father, and his ancient colleagues at the boys' school
where they live - poor Bilgewater (even her name is a joke,
perpetrated by the boarders) is a living illustration of the
Disraeli Quotation - "Youth is a blunder" - that prefaces her
first-person story. The reminiscence starts off as slow and
uneventful as her life at the school, with awful Tom Terrapin
calling her a Peeping Tom from his window on the "boys' side" and
popular head boy Jack Rose flattering her with the loan of Ulysses
constituting the most memorable moments of her early teens. But it
builds into an almost surrealistic confluence of encounters,
involving the same boys, with Bilge at seventeen climbing in and
out of windows, buses, and beds in a panicky but ambivalent attempt
to escape uncomfortable contacts. The same sort of distraction,
dislocation, and impetuous flight marked The Summer After the
Funeral (1973), but compared to Summer. . .'s Athene, rueful,
ironic Bilge takes herself - well, not less seriously perhaps but
with something of an outsider's perspective. ("Beware of
self-pity," the housekeeper's motto, could be hers as well.) At
once detached and painfully self-preoccupied, Bilgewater has a
sharp inner eye that is equally cool and observant whether it is
turned inward or out onto the variously flawed and dotty Britishers
of her constricted world. (Kirkus Reviews)
Marigold Green calls herself 'hideous, quaint and barmy'. Other
people calle her Bilgewater, a corruption of Bill's daughter.
Growing up in a boys' school where her father is housemaster, she
is convinced of her own plainness and peculiarity. Groomed by the
wise and loving Paula, upstaged by bad, beautiful Grace and ripe
for seduction by entirely the wrong sort of boy, she suffers
extravagantly and comically in her pilgrimage through the
turbulent, twilight world of alarming adolescence
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