Born to giggle

Richard Usborne

Girls Will Be Girls Arthur Marshall (Hamish Hamilton £2.95)

Although Marshall's first devotion is to girls' schools in fiction, the longest piece in this collection, The Crooked Bat', is about his own, boys-only, prep-school. And so vividly does he evoke the smells, the chilblains, the headmaster's deaf wife, the scuffles with bachelor masters among the mackintoshes, and the spiders in the cricket pay that I was sure that his e.g. sea-bathing and genital-protectors for first and second Eleven batsmen in matches were deliberately misleading, and that Marshall (A) had been at the same inland establishment as I had. I looked him up in our Old Boys' Register, but, unless he was struck off, or had changed his name, I must accept that he really was at Stirling Court on the Hampshire coast.

Anyway, had he been at my place, he would surely have remembered, and written about, 'smirking.' Indeed, in the special, single meaning of the word there and then, Marshall (A) would certainly have been constantly hauled up for that very offence. To smirk, there and then, was to smile knowingly, and infuriatingly, in such a way that a master thought he must have shaving soap in his ears, mid-morning milk on his moustache or his fly-buttons undone. My best friend was an uncontrollable smirker, and much punished for it. Marshall (A) would seldom have been out of Black Book ("Offence: smirking"), is my guess. He'd have remembered it, and would have written it into this piece.

There I go with a quote-in-brackets, a frequent grace-note in Marshall's syntax. Here he is with his nose in a schoolgirl novel, Susan's Stormy Term, by Nancy Moss:

However, in the end, hockey is firmly established (centre forward: Elsie Gordon), and there's more chess, with Susan Savage playing a dashing game at fifth board. Pleasures come thick and fast — walks ("The downs look swish for a ramble"), a fire-alarm ("The girls rushed headlong for the exits"), the Headmistress's unfortunate brother ("He's up to some mischief in that cave, I'll be bound"), Madam Raoul's hair-dos ("Very charming and a real artist"), girls called Mavis Moorhead, Alerdyce Bell; Cora Wimbore and Lola Consett, and there's a skewbald quadruped which "lips interestedly" at Susan's gym, tunic ("He's only saying how-d'you-do").

Marshall is undoubtedly the world's leading expert in English schoolgirl fiction, from Angela Brazil of hallowed memory to the modern purveyors of ponies and space-travel ("With their plastic breathing apparatuses. working to perfection, Brenda and Beryl step lithely out, plant the school flag on the nearest eminence, collect some specimens for Miss Prendergast's geology class, take a snap or two . .").

-Six of the entries in this self-chosen anthology are reviews, for a weekly magazine, of books for girls at Christmas. Quotes-in-brackets, yes. But look at those names. Marshall is a devout name-cropper. I believe that, as 'Beachcomber' from a list of Huntingdonshire cabmen, Marshall would get pleasure from the names of, let us say, the girls in the San at Roedean today But names from schoolgirl novels please him, too. He rolls them round his, tongue, his mind and his typewriter. In Prefects. at Springdale, by Dorita Fairlie Bruce, a Miss, Peters who enlivens her convetsation with cries of "Hoots toots" and "Tits, lassies!" offers; a prize for the most go-ahead house, and one house captain decides her lot will go all out for the prize with domestic science.

And they do, too, eventually winning Miss Peters' prize, which turns out to be "a pot of exquisite Eastern workmanship, containing a dwarf cedar tree, gnarled into a perfect miniature." The names of the girls who receive this charming trophy are Marion Banister. Louise Sturges, Isolt Kingsley, Tibbie Macfie and Feamelith Macpherson.

Other reviewers of Norma Jean, a posihumous book about Marilyn Monroe, would not have thought it important that the directrice of.

the Los Angeles Blue Book Model Agency which put (née) Norma Jean out to hire for, er, calendar art was Emmeline Snively. To Marshall, thanks be, it is utterly important. In a review of an autobiographical book by Godfrey Winn,

And out ... gush the names: Lady Mountbatten ('But don't you see, Godfrey ...?'), A. V. Alexander ('Don't you see, Godfrey. . .?') Lord Mountbatten ('Look, there's the crown of India, Godfrey'), Lord Beaverbrook ('Capital, Godfrey, capital') ...

It takes Marshall to remind us, on a slightly different tack, that the

aeronaught Amy Johnson had one of her front teeth broken by a cricket ball and that she was the only girl at the Boulevard Secondary School, Hull, who could bowl over-arm.

In addition to those two books by Godfrey Winn, Marshall has included some stinging reviews of books by, or about, for instances, Malcolm MacDonald, Dr Christiaan Barnard, Barbara Cartland, Lady Aberconway, Lady Docker, Aimee MacPherson, Edith Summer shill, -Ethel M. Dell, Isadora Duncan and Elsa Maxwell. He has an acute ear for "tumbril talk" (lovely phrase: his). He can put the steel-capped boot in at aristo pretentiousness. But some of his reviews are full of praise where praise is due.

As for Richard Kennedy's A Boy at the Hogarth Press, from which Marshall quotes a passage about "that modish literary pastime, cricket" as played by Bloomsbury.

David Garnett gave us a very agreeable welcome and fed us on beer and sandwiches. We went to the pavilion where Clive Bell was holding forth about cricket being like a ballet . . . He approached the crease rather like Serge Lifar. He made a ridiculous sort of cow shot the first ball, was lucky to connect and scored a boundary, but when he was stumped he started to argue with the umpire in the most unsportsmanlike manner, making all sorts of allusions to Japanese literature.

To Marshall (A), the writer, the sharp and often devastating critic, the broadcaster, I commend, for a future literary examination, an egregiously bad 1896 public school novel by the then HM of Harrow, Welldon. Its name, Gerald Eversley's Friendship. Marshall, boy and longtime master at Oundle, might be able to imagine (I can't) what the conversation could have been in the master's common room when the fat HM breezed in, the first day of the, new term after the publication of this sappy, soppy, drippy book, his first, and last, novel. A Harrow Mr Chips of my acquaintance had never even heard of the book till I mentioned it to him recently.

It is in the Vaughan Library there. In 1896 surely every assistant master would have made it his holiday task to read it, so as to have something flattering to say to the Old Man, its

presumably proud author. But what? In fact neither the Times (long obituary) nor the Dic

tionary of National Biography (long entry) mentions this absurd book. Unless Marshall has access to the Vaughan Library at Harrow, I can tell him he will find Gerald Eversley's Friendship at the London Library, if I haven't taken it out for yet another revolting wallow. • From Marshall's review of Norah, by Lady Docker: After the death of her first of three millionaire husbands, Callingham of Henekey's,

she passed to the elderly Cerebos king, Sir William Collins, 'Wilkie' to his friends ('His family crest bore the motto "Salt Satisfies" '), who called her 'little girl' even during those agitating weeks when he changed his will CI clipped him angrily overthe top of the head

with the New York Times'). During his illness there was another shock: 'I found one of the night nurses in bed with Wilkie . . . Wilkie, in his collapsed state, thought the nurse was me!' Oh, I see. There was just time to get the silly old will changed back. .

Richard Usborne's classic Clubland Heroes is to be reissued by Barrie and Jenkins.