March 1961
This is Miss O’Donovan’s second novel, and unlike Miss English, she has made much good use of a professional background: what her characters are has a great deal to do with what they do. Her heroine, Jenny Brown, is a new and young teacher at Gudge Street School in London. Jenny has been given Form O - made up of toughs and near delinquents, and run by a backward but forceful twelve-year-old called Sam, ‘who moved with the mad co-ordination of a crippled tank’, and whose language, I must say, is a delight - at least, to read. The only member of the staff who is friendly to her is Jack Star, a Communist, married and about twenty years older than she, who cannot resist seducing any personable young woman and at the same time trying to recruit her to the Party. As Jenny’s home is a country town and she is living in a furnished room with no friends in sight the first part of Jack’s programme is not difficult, and as it would be hard to someone with Jenny’s earnest simple nature not to equate having an affair with being in love - she is in love. To compensate for her imagination about her lover (in no time there seem to be two of him - one present, one absent) she starts trying to make her relationship with her family, a step-father and a neurotic mother a more honest and interesting business.
Apart from her tremendously good school atmosphere (the children are brilliantly drawn, as are the staff-room scenes with their jersey-knit bonhomie and bitchery, and there is a headmaster whose conversation is a mixture of a scrambled sports commentary and the dregs of any distant political speech), Miss O’Donovan has that unusual gift for writing scenes which tremble between pathos and near farce - they are very funny, and they are sad, and it is this kind of double-barrelled accuracy that makes the people she writes about both touching and surprising.