ABSTRACT
During the summer of 1940 the Vicar of a small villagewith whom I was acquainted told me of an extremelybackward girl of 16,1 and asked whether anything could be done to help her. She was the only daughter of a superior labourer named Wright who had migrated from Northern Ireland to England in order to take up a situation as cowman for a neighbouring farmer. They were, he said, godfearing people and he would point them out to me in church. At first sight, apart from a habit of holding her head down as if slightly shrunk into her shoulders, the girl appeared outwardly normal, on the plump side and with ruddy cheeks. If there was anything specially noticeable about her it was perhaps a rather extreme quietness and circumspection, though this was in itself not necessarily out of keeping with the till recently feudal character of the village. The Vicar said, however, that it was indeed but the outward and visible symptom of a nature so retiring that she would speak to no-one but her mother and consequently had no real friends in the village, spending her time doing nothing but odd jobs in and about her parents' cottage and everlastingly reading any books she could lay hands OD.
