14 JUNE 1957, Page 25

Harm Intended. By Richard Parker. (Seeker and Warburg, 15s.) Here,

too, is life as people might reasonably be imagined as living it— buoyed up by the pools and cast down by the eleven-plus. A man in a modest . way wins a packet, and a couple of most realistically stupid delinquents make a number of bosh shots at chiselling it out of him. A clutch of unsenti- mentalised children add to the verisimilitude, and have a proper part in the plot. Uncommonly