Book 19 – “No Boys Play Here” by Sally Bayley

Sally Bayley’s biography No Boys Play Here is the story of her difficult childhood. It’s an unusual biography because she tells the story in snippets and descriptions and includes references to Shakespeare characters who she compares with the men in her life. The book also has drawings as illustrations of Sally’s feelings rather than of actual people and events. What I didn’t realise when I bought this book is that this is the second volume in her biography – the first appears to have dealt with the strong women in her family and this book talks about the weak men. The author recaps many of the events which are not included in this book in an Afterword which might, perhaps, have been better situated at the beginning of the book for those of us who had not read the first volume.

The men in Sally’s family include her father, her uncle, a stepfather figure, her brothers and a decorator who stayed with the family. All of these men were part of her life but their voices and actions were determined and overwhelmed by her mother and aunt. Sometimes the men would be allowed to be part of the family and sometimes they were not. Most of them drank and none of them was reliable. All of them contributed to Sally’s decision to leave the family and go into care when she was a teenager.

This book is written in a poetic style and Shakespeare’s plays, especially the character of Falstaff, are quoted and used for comparison. I confess that I found this frustrating. The facts of what had happened to Sally were lost in the descriptions of her feelings about herself and the men in and around her life. This is a perfectly valid way for Sally to tell her life story but I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t enjoy the writing for its own sake and I wanted the book to be clearer and more linear – this is clearly a reflection of my limitations, especially as this is a highly regarded book and the author is now an academic.