Book review: No Boys Play Here a ‘misery memoir’ with a dash of Shakespeare

Sally Bayley, who grew up in poverty and neglect, and voluntarily went into care at 14, became a lecturer of English at Oxford

Sally Bayley. Picture: Alice Sholto-Douglas

DEPENDING on your relationship with William Shakespeare, you might be running away pretty quickly from Sally Bayley’s No Boys Play Here, the second volume of her memoir following Girl With Dove, which is now on the A-level English reading list and is being adapted for theatre.

As the title suggests, men rarely appeared in Bayley’s childhood home, where they’re all servants waiting to leave. And when the men did appear, “they brought hostile paces” and a battle usually broke out. Set in a Scottish council house that’s leased to Frank - “without a doubt a swine” - Bayley cannot remember much of her father, who went missing sometime after the war.