What a Difference a Dust Jacket Makes

What attracted me to this book at the library? It certainly wasn’t the title. “The Secret Life of a Schoolgirl!” No thanks, not interested. Was it the notes inside the front cover?:

But one day Rosemary’s life changed forever. At a cafe where she had gone to escape from a party her father insisted she attend with him, she met Richard Burton, the dashingly handsome Welsh actor who was then the toast of the London stage. She had seen him in Under Milkwood some months before. She was an adolescent schoolgirl. He was twenty nine.

At this point is was pretty obvious where the book was headed and I still wasn’t too interested. No, what drew me to the book was the dust jacket, with the sepia photo of earnest schoolgirls and even more earnest teachers lined up and squinting into the sun. School photo day was a big occasion in my youth and the photo brought back vivid memories.

The book itself turned out to be interesting on several levels. Rosemary Kingsland’s family gives new meaning to the word dysfunctional and she steers a wobbly course between a charming but often drunk womanizer of a father and a mother who was brought up by nuns in a convent in the Himalayas and couldn’t imagine how she would cope with four children in an austere post-war England. There is a fascinating and bloody glimpse of life at the end of the Raj, when the family was forced to flee the comforts of India for the precarious safety of England. There is a wonderful account of the horror expressed by Doris Day, who, on her way back from entertaining the troops, was forced to share a cabin with the author’s family. “These are the worst children I have ever met,” she is quoted as saying. “Six weeks at sea with them will kill me.”

For me the enjoyment came from the memories evoked by the music and general ambience of teenage life in the 50’s in England, even though I occasionally thought that her lists of pop favorites were derived from Google rather than actual recollection.

Of Richard Burton and the part he played in Rosemary Kingsland’s coming of age, the less said, the better. Neither protagonist emerges gracefully. When Burton finally learns that the teenager he is juggling with his wife and Claire Bloom is only fourteen, his first thoughts are of himself: ”I could get seven years in the clink if this ever comes out.”

There was much I wanted to check about this book. I discovered that the paperback edition had the kind of sleazy dust jacket which would have totally repelled me. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the book had also been published under the name Hold Back the Night, this time with the dust jacket graced by an enormous profile of Richard Burton. One book, two titles, three dust jackets?

I don’t feel like sorting that lot out. I prefer to pull out my old photos (I’m the surly looking one, back row, third from the left) and wonder which of my earnest looking fellow prefects could have been living her own “secret life.”