A Country Girl

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30977, 5 February 1966, Page 4

A Country Girl

Honestly, the Country! By Sheila Turner. Macdonald. 202 pp.

As the title suggests, this is a comic symposium of life in an English village. It has something in common with that one-time American bestseller “With Malice towards Some,” but though it is neither so witty nor so waspish as Margaret Halsey’s book, it not unnaturally shows a far better understanding of the English character. Sally Burton, who tells her story in diary form, represents suburbia from her wellcoiffured head to her stiletto heels, and when her husband, Bill, i« offered the job of agent to a landowner in the remote Somerset village of King’s Standing (with comfortable free house included) only her genuine wifely devotion compels her to simulate enthusiasm for the project. Of course she ends up by loving the village, the country, and her home, but the initiation process is full of pitfalls and heartaches, all of which she records for the benefit of her readers. There is a completely authentic note about a number of her reactions to rustic life—her early fear of cows, overcome with much difficulty, the town girl's scorn of Women’s

Institutes with their “kids’ games" and out-dated traveltalks, her relations with her neighbours (half superior half apologetic), and her fondness for her “daily help,” who is a faithfully observed specimen of a typicaljy English breed. What is, however, a trifle puzzling is the assumption that the English countryside is so isolated that “burial” in it for a suburban dweller represents a terrific uprooting. Actually the world of the supermarket, cinema, hairdresser and other essential adjuncts of civilisation, as recognised by Tooting Bee, is never more than a few miles away, and Mrs Burton overemphasises the effects of this aspect of her new life. She has an “adorable” Old English sheepdog, loathes an unpleasant female breeder of whippets, has to fend off the attentions of a bored playwright who has a cottage in the neighbourhood, and becomes involved in a domestic drama which flares up between two people in her limited social circle. It is all light and pleasant, and, to a reviewer familiar with the setting, sufficiently true to life to be amusing. The author is well served by Nocrington whose illustrations are almost the best feature of the book.