Marion’s New Home is something of a transitional story, moving the story on from their summer in Harrogate to life back in Liverpool. I plumped for Knowsley as a place where Kristoph would live because it is a quite nice, leafy suburb as I recall it, though in all honesty I haven’t been there since I was at school and we visited Knowsley Safari Park. I do remember seeing a lot of the area, though. My dad was a notoriously bad navigator and we always got lost in the car and drove round lots of estates. Anyway, the house in the pictures on the HTML version of the story was actually in Knowsley and up for sale at the time, and fits the profile. If anyone has subsequently bought that house, it might surprise them to discover it has had its fifteen minutes of internet fame.

Kristoph has a nice middle class lifestyle with classical music in his cd collection and good wine in a rack in the kitchen. He has a classic car in the garage and his house is nicely furnished. Marion has left behind the poor life that she sought to escape from.

The problems at the university were inevitable, of course. Somebody was going to find out about them sooner or later. The solution, that Marion moves to a different university, is the obvious one. Liverpool does have three such institutions, University of Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores and Liverpool Hope University, which is a Catholic one, though it does take students of all denominations. Marion thus leaves the larger University of Liverpool for the smaller Hope University. I don’t, in fact, think it is possible to transfer as quickly as it happened in this story. But then, having a Time Lord on your side helps.

I wanted to get over that incident quickly, so the story switches after that to the first morning that Marion wakes in her own bedroom in her new home and finds Kristoph meditating in his special room. This isn’t going to feature a lot in the stories, but lets assume he always does that. He has a bedroom, too, of course. And Marion finds it. This, in any different sort of story might end another way entirely. In THESE stories, Marion simply finds out about videophones and talks to Kristoph’s mother.

Of course, most of the readers of Marion and Kristoph had already read Theta Sigma for a year when they began. So they knew what it meant when they read this piece of dialogue:

“Mama, I meant to introduce you later. This is Marion. She is my betrothed. We love each other very much.”
“I am pleased for you, my son. As will your father be, I am sure. But… She is an Earth Child?”
“Yes, she is.”
“You know the difficulties of such a union?”

It refers, of course, to problems having babies, to snobbishness about mixed unions and other such problems that lie ahead for our heroine. But all that IS in the past, of course.

http://www.liv.ac.uk/
http://www.livjm.ac.uk/
http://www.hope.ac.uk/