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

Sat, 27 Mar, 2021 - 13:00

Review: Eoghan O’Sullivan

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.

A la Shakespeare, we are introduced to the cast of characters - ‘Dramatic Personae’ - before the story begins. The Bayleys and Co (“as strange a family as you’ll see”) include her mother Angela (“Sometimes thought of as Titania, Queen of the Fairies, until the magic wears off” - from A Midsummer Night’s Dream), her aunt Diane, who was once a Jessica too - a Jessica being a female given name in Shakespeare’s works - and Maze, her grandmother. There are some 44 characters listed, and, like the premise itself, is enough to scare off the reader.

The summer her dad went away for good, when Bayley is around 12/13, she is reading Shakespeare up on the Downs, away with the fairies, while the rest of the children and at the beach. Her mother can still recite Shakespeare that she learned at school, and is proud of it as it’s real poetry. It helps take them away from their everyday life, which soon becomes evident, is one of squalor, where “no one had the time or money to find a Launcelot to help”. And it’s Shakespeare, “another kind of devil to get off once you start”, who teaches Bayley about men.

If the reader still has nightmares and King Lear and The Merchant of Venice from school exams (ahem), then they might well want to gloss over the reams of quotes and references. And that’s before you get to the plays you never studied, like Henry IV. It’s hard to imagine someone not well versed in the playwright getting the most out of No Boys Play Here. But ultimately it is the art of Shakespeare that helps Bayley make sense of the world, something to which we can all relate.

With amusing illustrations throughout, No Boys Play Here zips by, its coming-of-age tale revealed in memorable scenes, most clearly when Uncle James appears. Bayley’s writing is flowing with wit and clarity, too. See: “The sun is dangerous for men; it turns them red. Drink does the same: red noses, red cheeks, red scalps, red hands.” No Boys Play Here falls into the rising literary genre of bibliomemoir, a personal story told through the writer’s bookshelves.

While some readers will enjoy the bits between Shakespeare, there are plenty who might well be reaching for their old, battered copies of Romeo and Juliet afterwards.