1937 thriller. Caroline Watts, not wanting to be a burden on her
married sister, takes up a post as games mistress at a minor school
for girls, but soon runs up against the horrid Matron Miss
Yaxley-Moore, who seems to have the Head under her thumb. Was the
previous games mistress's death really misadventure?
Well, this isn't a mystery book. The main business seems to be to
ladle on the atmosphere, and White does an excellent job here; Creepy
School has been done many times before and since, but rarely as well,
and with particular attention paid to the toxic atmosphere produced by
the people. Yaxley-Moore runs séances (thus the title), and predicts
Doom so effectively that Caroline starts to think she might be helping
it come to pass.
But then there's a clear bit of dereliction of duty, and a vital piece
of evidence that has to be delivered to the right people… except that
Caroline is going away on holiday first and will sort it all out when
she gets back. It's all carefully set up (she has spent all her money
on the holiday, and only found out about the evidence at the last
moment), but it's a bit sad and modern compared with what one feels a
thriller heroine ought to do.
The result, though, is one of the most atmospheric sequences I've read
for a while, as Caroline takes a cross-country bus back to the school
to make everything right… but Yaxley-Moore is not her only enemy, and
she has no idea who else on the bus might be opposition. Each stop
brings a crucial decision: get out and risk being lost and delayed? Or
be one of the few to stay on board, perhaps alone with one of the
Ungodly? As fog brews up and everything gets slower, Caroline is
trapped in a nightmare with no idea whom she can trust.
At the same time, there's rather too much heavy-handed foreboding,
which often takes the form of Had She But Known. There's a remarkable
amount of coincidence. But this is a book to wallow in (though there's
a remarkably accurate description of sleep paralysis in an early
chapter), and one which happily indulges in its gothicness without
being a blatantly supernatural story.
And there's a character called Miss Bat of Bat House. How can you go
wrong with that?
She realised that she loathed this girl with a direct personal
hatred which had no connection with her half-sister. She abominated
her for all that she was and did; for her mauve silk trousers and
her safety razor—for the spilt ash on the carpet—for her derision of
the priceless heritage of ancestry.
Freely available from
Project Gutenberg Australia.
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.