My Friend Jane Duncan Trivia Quiz

Answer: Reachfar

Even when the action of the books is in England, or far off in the Caribbean, the emotional centre is always at Reachfar.

Answer: Tom

"In memory, I see them always standing gazing around them, puffing at their pipes, arguing or chatting, but on Reachfar ground there are to this day the walls that they built, the roads they made, the easily swinging gates that they constructed and hung. I can remember being present at the building, the making, the constructing and the hanging, but the detail I remember is the algebraic argument or the gossip of the countryside."

Answer: Sir Ian Dulac

Achcraggan lies on the shore of the Firth that the north scullery window of Reachfar looks down on. "The entrance to the Firth was guarded by two cliffs, called the North and South Cobblers, after two giant shoe-makers who lived and worked, in the days of the giants, one on each cliff, and used to share one hammer between them, tossing it to and fro across the deep, mile-wide sea channel that separated them."

Answer: No

Janet's brother John, known as Jock, grows up to become the father of the "Hungry Generation": Liz, Dunc, Gee and Sandy-Tom.

Answer: Jean

Jean had been their housekeeper before she married Duncan. She was a conventional, house-proud, not-too-intelligent woman, with a filthy bad temper; not the best choice of stepmother for a girl raised in the Reachfar atmosphere of George and Tom. Jean was intolerant of Janet's Highland ways - "She's no' like ither folk!"

Answer: they were both in the WAAF during the war

"Monica and I first met in the Operations Room of an Air Force station during the 1939 - 1945 war, and for posterity, if posterity can stop running for a moment and make a pause to read, I wish to record that around the end of 1940 you could have quite an exciting - not to say hair-raising - time in an Operations Room of the Air Force."

Answer: Twice

"...his Christian name is Alexander and his surname is Alexander again, and it is just as well, I feel, that his parents did not feel called upon to give him a middle name."

Answer: Flash

When Janet was a young woman, she worked for a short time for a pen-pal club called the "Chain of Friendship". The husband of the woman who ran the club, Mr Rollin, became quite a friend of Janet's. (He was a Mae West fan, and they would sneak off to the movies together.) His name for her, based on the name of a play, was "Lady Flashing Stream".
Years later, when Janet and Twice were working at Slater's Works, Twice saw a letter from Mr Rollin, addressed to "Lady Flashing Stream". He secretly started thinking of Janet as "Flash", until it came out in one of their tempestuous rows.

Answer: St Jago

St Jago is based on the real island of Jamaica, where Jane Duncan (Jane Duncan is a pen name, by the way, her real name was Elizabeth Jane Cameron) lived for eight years.

Answer: Paradise

Paradise is one of the very few big family-owned plantations left. The family consists of the autocratic old woman, Madame Dulac, her son Sir Ian, and grandson, Edward.

Answer: Crookmill

This is a row of attached stone cottages which they convert to one house. Monica and Lucy (the English half of Loose-and-Daze) move into the back two rooms soon after Janet's and Twice's marriage. It becomes known as the Ben the Hoose "the social hub of Ballydendran, not to mention Glasgow, Edinburgh and satellite towns".

Answer: Roddy Maclean

Roddy is delighted when, during a quarrel, Janet calls him "Roddy Reachfar". He really is part of the family.

Answer: a dancer

"Both his legs were artificial.... so that he could walk only in a mincing unnatural fashion but Sashie regarded his disability as his own private affair and he concealed it by exaggerating it. He had adopted and dramatised all the mannerisms accepted by the conventional minds as peculiar to the homosexual to the point, almost, of caricature and he wore silk shirts and linen trousers of brilliant colours which, in the year 1958, made him stand out among the more conventionally and drably dressed men of the island like a parakeet among a flock of crows."

Answer: heart disease

Twice's illness makes a tremendous difference to their lives. He can no longer work as the representative of Allied Plant, and takes a much less demanding job at Paradise. More importantly, they can never again live in Scotland, as Twice would not be able to survive the winters. Janet must resign herself to a future spent on the island for which she has such mixed feelings.

Answer: Achcraggan

Reachfar having been sold many years before, Janet moves into Jemima Cottage, which had been left to her by her Aunt Betsy. George and Tom had been living there with Jean, Janet's stepmother, but she had quarreled with them, and moved out. This last book of the series ends with Tom's death, and the revelation that he had not, all these years, been only her friend, but her uncle too. I'm sure that I'm not the only reader of these books who cried at Tom's funeral; I felt that I had lost an old friend.