The title, Priddy Barrows, refers to a school for handicapped boys located on the edge of the Mendips and run by a Napoleonesque headmaster called Captain Nelson Hayes. The novel recounts the events of a year in the lives of the people connected with, or living near, the school. Gerald Trested is one such. He sold his bookshop in London to come and teach at Priddy Barrows. At first, he finds Hayes fearsome - and Hayes' brother, Drimble, weak but well-intentioned - but soon warms to both. The boys are rowdy bullies, but they too he comes to appreciate. He takes a small cottage in the nearby village of Priddy. After Linda Ysaye, sister-in-law of the local squire, shelters there from the rain, believing the cottage still unoccupied, the two drift into a relationship and engagement.

Meanwhile Nelson Hayes is buying up all the surrounding land, for reasons unknown. This includes the house rented by Mrs Maidment, and her son and daughter. And the tied cottage inhabited by old Dunty Vowles, a poacher, and his daughter, a maid at the school. Vowles suffers during the novel. Not entirely right in the head, he has his daughter taken from him, is evicted from his tied cottage, and eventually sectioned. Other characters include the artist Mark Turls and his wife, and the local reverend Luke Francis.

Priddy Barrows is set in the late 1930s - Nelson Hayes fought in the Great War - but there is something about the story which makes it feel as though it were set earlier. The novel is not a typical beginning - middle - end sort of story. Trested's arrival at the school is not the start, nor is his eventual breaking of his engagement with Linda Ysaye the end. Having said that, nearly every character in the novel does undergo some form of story-arc, each of which intersects as the characters' lives intersect. (The exceptions are the Turls, who end the book pretty much as they began it.)

See the rest ofthe review at: http://justhastobeplausible.blogspot.com/2007/11/forgotten-classic-or-just-forgo... ( )