A medium sized hard covered black book with the title, author and publisher imprinted in gold across the spine only. The fly leaf repeats the title only, and the title page has the title in large italicised black type with elaborate serifs, followed by the author, and the publisher beneath an insignia at the foot, given as from London. Overleaf the copyright notice is dated 1960, and the printer is Richard Clay and company, Ltd, from Bungay in Suffolk. The dedication is to Rachael.

Oh will you surrender, oh will you surrender
The King of the Barbareens?
We won't surrender, we won't surrender
The King of the Barbareens,
I'll tell the King, I'll tell the King,
The King of the Barbareens.
You can tell the King, you can tell the King,
The King of the Barbareens.
They won't surrender, oh King, oh King.
Then I'll come after them, with a one, a two and a three.

Thus runs the rhyme that introduces the author's Norfolk childhood when aged four, and provides the title for this sensitively written book. She remembers being the first girl caught by the king to join the Barbareens. Her remarkable memory searches further back into being bundled around from place to place, as an unwanted orphan, and, writing aged forty, her erudition puts her among the ancient barbarians of East Anglia.

Severe illness in the form of an ear infection with serious complications led to a long period in a santorium, described in detail that includes flashes of affection, disaffection, response, and rejection, and an education thereafter marked by the effects of this illness and the complications of whooping cough.

In the background are Ladies from the Ministry of Pensions responsible for her many placements, through which she moves with perception and tenacity for some distant purpose. On page 56 she describes seeing an owl 'mobbed in the daytime by a heterogeneous collection of birds united only by the desire to oust the stranger' in relation to the other girls tormenting her at school, and Janet Hitchman was writing some years before Kosinsky's famous novel.

One of her longer relationships with an eccentric but valued carer designated as Mum was terminated when the she was discovered to have stolen some money from the house, without ever having been able to explain that it was a desperate bid to buy her Mum a present.

Chapter four is a fine piece of writing describing Gillingham Hall, and her time there with its elderly and unusual residents, in what promised to be an atmosphere of Dostoevskian gloom, but proved to be a mutually beneficial relationship between the intelligent interests of the two young inmates and the whims of the other mainly elderly lady inhabitants.

The life of a complicated adolescent girl with many phobias is changed by the methods and ethos of Thomas Anguish Hospital School of Housecraft for Girls, in Norwich, which took Elsie (her real name - she changed to Janet later) as a pupil because the headmistress saw the appeal of her, and she flourished, in all forms of educational and political growth, but then had to get a further placement in life.

At that relatively late stage she was sent to the Barnardo's Girls' Village Home at Barkingside. On entry she viewed it as a reformatory, run by a Holy Trinity - The Governors, Dr. Barnardo, and God, but the first were the legendary Misses Picton-Tuberville and McNaughton, and she had Mother Lewis as her Cottage Matron, all of whom have been described with admiration by other girls brought up in the GVH (Notes 9).

The sensitive, intelligent, unhappy, and untrusting girl changed to a student deserving of further education, and Janet Hitchman writes very positively of Barnardos.

Nevertheless, the further education and placement in life that enabled her to become a writer was a lonely course, unsustained by most efforts of love.

Comment: From almost totally unwanted to a little more wanted, as told by a writer of touching ability.