"A Young Girl's Touch" was Barbara Skelton's first novel published in 1955. Melinda Paleface, bearing a more than passing resemblance to the author, is a heart-throb: a high official in the Foreign Service, a French sailor, two English captains, an American airman, even the celebrated native King, Yoyo of Jubaland fall under her spell. And yet, among the other girls in the cypher department she is, as the original blurb, said 'as quiet as an Amanita in a basket of mushrooms'. Again to quote from the original blurb, 'Barbara Skelton reveals herself as a buoyant satirist, a mistress of the picaresque, a fresh and original humourist who casts a vivid and haunting life on the problem of men and women'.