About the Author and the Text

In the CBSE Class 12 English NCERT syllabus (Flamingo), "Going Places" by A. R. Barton is a prose lesson about adolescent fantasising and hero-worship. Before reading, it helps to know a little about the author, the story's working-class world, and the words the textbook itself asks you to notice.

The writer

"Going Places" is a short story by the writer A. R. Barton. It belongs to the tradition of realistic modern fiction that looks closely at ordinary people, particularly the young, and at the quiet disappointments of everyday working life. Barton's method in this story is understated and psychological: instead of dramatic events, he gives us the inner world of an adolescent girl, letting her daydreams and her real surroundings drift together until the reader can hardly tell where fact ends and fantasy begins. This blurring of the line between imagination and reality is the story's central technique.

The story and its setting

The story is set in an ordinary English town of modest, working-class families, in a world of cramped homes, factory jobs and limited horizons. Its central character is Sophie, a schoolgirl standing on the threshold of adulthood. She and her practical friend Jansie are, as the story bluntly puts it, expected to end up working in the local biscuit factory once they leave school. For most of the girls around them this is simply the shape their lives will take, and Jansie accepts it without much complaint.

Sophie, however, cannot bear the dullness of such a future, and she refuses to accept it in her imagination. She fills her mind with glamorous alternatives: owning a fashionable boutique, becoming an actress, or making a name as a fashion designer. These fantasies are her escape from a reality that offers her very little. Against this background Barton develops the story's most important strand — Sophie's elaborate fantasy about the young Irish football star Danny Casey, whom she claims to have met and who she imagines will meet her again. As this invented romance grows, the gap widens between the life Sophie dreams of and the life she is actually likely to have.

Why the context matters

To read the story well, it helps to keep in mind that Sophie is not a liar in any simple, wicked sense; she is a girl using imagination to cope with a narrow, unpromising world. Her class background, her family's poverty and the tedium of the future planned for her are not mere details but the very soil in which her daydreams grow. Barton invites sympathy for her longing to "go places" while gently exposing the danger of letting fantasy replace reality. Understanding this context — a sensitive adolescent hemmed in by working-class limitation and reaching for something larger through pure imagination — is essential to grasping the story's themes and its quietly sad ending.