REVIEW: Sally Travels to School
Jul. 1st, 2023 11:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllSally Travels to School: Muriel Fyfe
This rather short book (published in Blackie’s Summit library) is a quick and breezy read, and while it’s no classic, it isn’t meant to be taken too seriously, which rather undercuts its moral about being beastly to someone out of jealousy. However, it is genuinely witty, from the authorial descriptions of what’s going on to the girls’ banter.
It also has an unusual focus for schoolgirl stories, as the title suggests. At the start of the book, Sally Green has been admitted to Kelvinburgh High School, to much joy. She will have to travel there daily via train, and on her first day meets Pat, Sparrow and Midge. Pat is one of the exalted Fifth, but is kind to the new girl. However, Sally is A Heroine, to whom Things Happen. Some of them, especially in her first days, are her fault – not listening to her wise mother, day-dreaming when she shouldn’t. But it soon becomes clear to her and the readers that she has an enemy in her form, one Josephine ‘Linty’ Linton, who used to travel on the train with Pat and the other two. Linty envies Sally for now experiencing that and for receiving gestures of friendship that Linty used to enjoy. As Pat generously invites her fellow travellers to stay in the family cottage one half term, one can see why Linty is jealous, but what she does because of that jealousy is pretty bad.
Despite this, Sally makes friends in her form as well as her fellow commuters, but the scrapes she gets into always seem to bring her to the headmistress’s attention. Fortunately, Miss Barbara B. Bradshaw is one of the wise types, and the High School girls adore her, however rude they are about her – her nickname is B cubed. Meanwhile, the other girls accuse Sally of being catty about Linty, without knowing the whole truth, for Sally never tells of her suspicions about who is behind her run of ill luck.
Fyfe almost writes the chapters as if they were sketches – we hop from winter to Easter – it’s all very episodic. The penultimate event, a gymnastics competition where Sally has to step in alongside her rival to represent their form, sticks very firmly to the moralistic conventions of the genre. Sally’s heroism saves Linty from death, but her own life, or certainly her recovery is put in jeopardy because, in her delirium, she’s obsessed by Linty’s bullying (and that’s what it was.) But guilt-ridden Linty is the only one able to bring Sally back to sanity and let her sleep and heal – something most authors would take very seriously, but I felt this author, well, if she didn’t have her tongue in her cheek, she was writing it because the genre demanded it. If what had come before hadn’t been so entertainingly written, I’d be gritting my teeth, but this book succeeded at being witty, where so many others who try fail. Although the High School setting feels more realistic than the usual idealised descriptions of schools (the girls have to take a tram to get to the playing fields!) the likelihood of all these things happening to one person in a matter of months is low. This was much closer to it (it being Nancy Breary, for instance.) From what I could turn up, Fyfe seems to have written more for younger readers.
[Lightly edited 30/5/25.]
This rather short book (published in Blackie’s Summit library) is a quick and breezy read, and while it’s no classic, it isn’t meant to be taken too seriously, which rather undercuts its moral about being beastly to someone out of jealousy. However, it is genuinely witty, from the authorial descriptions of what’s going on to the girls’ banter.
It also has an unusual focus for schoolgirl stories, as the title suggests. At the start of the book, Sally Green has been admitted to Kelvinburgh High School, to much joy. She will have to travel there daily via train, and on her first day meets Pat, Sparrow and Midge. Pat is one of the exalted Fifth, but is kind to the new girl. However, Sally is A Heroine, to whom Things Happen. Some of them, especially in her first days, are her fault – not listening to her wise mother, day-dreaming when she shouldn’t. But it soon becomes clear to her and the readers that she has an enemy in her form, one Josephine ‘Linty’ Linton, who used to travel on the train with Pat and the other two. Linty envies Sally for now experiencing that and for receiving gestures of friendship that Linty used to enjoy. As Pat generously invites her fellow travellers to stay in the family cottage one half term, one can see why Linty is jealous, but what she does because of that jealousy is pretty bad.
Despite this, Sally makes friends in her form as well as her fellow commuters, but the scrapes she gets into always seem to bring her to the headmistress’s attention. Fortunately, Miss Barbara B. Bradshaw is one of the wise types, and the High School girls adore her, however rude they are about her – her nickname is B cubed. Meanwhile, the other girls accuse Sally of being catty about Linty, without knowing the whole truth, for Sally never tells of her suspicions about who is behind her run of ill luck.
Fyfe almost writes the chapters as if they were sketches – we hop from winter to Easter – it’s all very episodic. The penultimate event, a gymnastics competition where Sally has to step in alongside her rival to represent their form, sticks very firmly to the moralistic conventions of the genre. Sally’s heroism saves Linty from death, but her own life, or certainly her recovery is put in jeopardy because, in her delirium, she’s obsessed by Linty’s bullying (and that’s what it was.) But guilt-ridden Linty is the only one able to bring Sally back to sanity and let her sleep and heal – something most authors would take very seriously, but I felt this author, well, if she didn’t have her tongue in her cheek, she was writing it because the genre demanded it. If what had come before hadn’t been so entertainingly written, I’d be gritting my teeth, but this book succeeded at being witty, where so many others who try fail. Although the High School setting feels more realistic than the usual idealised descriptions of schools (the girls have to take a tram to get to the playing fields!) the likelihood of all these things happening to one person in a matter of months is low. This was much closer to it (it being Nancy Breary, for instance.) From what I could turn up, Fyfe seems to have written more for younger readers.
[Lightly edited 30/5/25.]
