Bab's Diary

Snow-dusted mansions, gossiping aunts, and the claustrophobic twinkle of Christmas lights frame the homecoming of Barbara ‘Bab’ Archibald, a boarding-school evacuee whose gangly limbs and ungovernable curls mark her, in family eyes, as perennially prepubescent. While the household fusses over elder sister Leila’s imminent nuptials to the affable but patronising Carter Brooks, Bab—half woman, half firecracker—discovers that her own desires are politely shelved next to the children’s table. In a fever of humiliation she forges a paramour from a stolen magazine still: the velvet-eyed matinee idol Harold Valentine. The fantasy man, ink on paper, becomes her shield against condescension. Brooks, amused and slightly spiteful, recognises the face, wires the actor, and imports flesh-and-blood glamour to the doorstep. When the real Valentine materialises at Bab’s coming-out soirée, the gag mutates into vertiginous farce; identity implodes, letters vanish, and the heroine—now desperado—pilfers through the star’s suite, trips a burglar alarm, and is hauled off in handcuffs. Sentence: expulsion back to the convent-like academy, a lesson in the bitter cost of self-authorship.