Crazy Mixed-Up Cad

DAYS AND MOMENTS QUICKLY FLYING (256pp.)--Perry Madoc--Viking($3.75).

The "Sunnylands Grange Select Summer School for Boys" is a moth-Eton travesty of an English public school. Its playing fields of welfare-state spivs supply most of the antic humor to be found in this uneven first novel. Oliver Ventnor, the book's mock-hero, is sent down from Oxford for forging his uncle's name to a check. Stony-broke and stonily rebuked by his pastor father, Oliver signs on as a teaching "captain" at Sunnylands Grange.

This gloomy Victorian coastal mansion is run by a bland sharper who calls himself Dr. Chesterfield. An educational quack, Chesterfield prates of clean minds and bodies but has sold four of the school's five bathtubs. Boating and riding are advertised in the school brochure. But the boat is a suicidally leaky scow, and riding is discontinued when the resident donkey drops dead and is carved to vary the diet of congealed herring and paste porridge.

Before justice of a sort catches up with the feckless Oliver, he either seduces or proves irresistible to: 1) his father's gardener's daughter, 2) a blowzy barmaid, 3) a golddigger, 4) a bohemian nymphomaniac, 5) his elder brother's fiancee. Oliver may be just a crazy mixed-up cad to the reader, but in a fatuously psychiatrical reconciliation scene, Oliver's father shoulders the blame: "I think perhaps you represented to me the little daughter I never had and always longed for." A Sunnylands Granger would have the answer to that one: "Not bloody likely."

The author's odd conclusion is perhaps colored by the fact that Perry Madoc is all girl, and a parson's daughter. Anne Humphreys by name, she is a fortyish Welsh woman, chose the house of Collins as her English publisher "because you publish the Book of Common Prayer."

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