All a Big Niddle

DON'T KNOCK THE CORNERS OFF by Caroline Glyn. 256 pages. Coward-McCann. $3.95.

It must be pretty smashing to be a 15-year-old English schoolgirl and your best friend asks you what you are going to do when you grow up apart from getting married and all that and you say: "Be a novelist."

And then, sort of casually you say, "As a matter of fact, I am one this very minute." Then while her jaws are still agape or she's saying: "Pooh! I don't believe it," you say, not too one-uppishly: "It's not hard really, not nearly as hard as math. Mother told me my great-grandmother way back in the Dark Ages wrote hundreds and hundreds of novels. She was called Elinor Glyn and Lord Curzon was madly in love with her and I thought if she can, so can I."

No Burbles. This could be no less than the truth for Caroline Glyn, who is in fact Elinor Glyn's great-granddaughter but whose prose is much better. It can be said confidently that Caroline's 256-page tale of English school life is the best novel by a 15-year-old ever written; more important, it is one of the best school stories to emerge from any age group.

Most readers approaching such a work will have a suspicious eye out for innocent fakery or artless burble, but will find neither. All the grandeurs and miseries of life between nine and 15 are experienced by Caroline's heroine--Antonia Rutherford ("Buddersmud" to her coevals). All the savagery of child civilization boils about the muddy asphalt and precipitous stone stairs of the London primary school. Derision and clownish aggression is the prechivalric code between the nonsexes. There are friendships of Byronic intensity and power alliances of Renaissance intricacy. The tormented teaching staff is examined through a child's merciless eye for dandruff, horse teeth, injustice and facial tics. One of them (the one with the horse teeth) has the pedagogic foible--enchanting to the young--of hanging them by the heels to demonstrate vulgar fractions.

No Worry. It is all great fun. As there should be, there is a lot about Mummy, who is a worrying sort, and Daddy, who is not. Daddy is a painter, and if the reader finds him not so delightful as his daughter does, that, too, is as it should be. No one could. And surely all hearts will echo to the anti-school manifesto Antonia puts in her private book (known to this precocious moppet as her "escapism book"): "IT'S NOT FAIR IT'S NOT FAIR IT'S ALL A BIG NIDDLE."

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