It’s not often that books make me laugh aloud. Even books I’m officially finding funny often do no more than make me smile, or emit a sharp soundless puff of breath from the nostrils. But this book made me guffaw. Normally, only P. G. Wodehouse has that effect.
It’s tragicomedy, really. Julie Welch’s subject is a ripe one for tragicomedy, as I should know, having written on it myself: life inside girls’ boarding schools — or in this case, life inside Felixstowe College (founded 1929, closed down 1994) to which Welch went in the early 1960s, and which shaped her whole being to such an extent that she’s convinced her gravestone will read ‘Here lies Julie Welch (R)’ — Ridley being the house she was in, as opposed to Cranmer, Latimer or Tyndale.
Illuminating every comic detail is its dark shadow — some crazed, frustrated matron or housemistress with ‘blackened, seaweedy hair’, or some kind of difficult home life.
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