This looks like a nice nostalgic read with it's watercolour pictures on the cover, but don't let yourself get too comfortable as life in the countryside between the wars was not all pretty flowers and hayricks.
It starts off quietly as you get to know the characters, but before long it becomes impossible to put down, and I got stuck in that bind of racing through the final pages but not wanting the story to come to an end. The author was clearly born long after the period of English history that she writes about, but my goodness, she captures the mood and the feel of what it must have been like to be a fourteen year old girl at that time.
I am in my mid sixties, and had relatives living in Suffolk when I was a child and my elderly aunts were living their lives in a way that had seen little change since the turn of the century. I remember the tiny cottage rooms with no indoor plumbing and jugs with basins set out in the bedrooms to allow people to wash before bed. All of this came flooding back to me and I became totally immersed in the writing.
The storyline has plenty of atmospheric portraits of what life was like when the harvest had to be bought in using strong men and horses, but what I found particularly good was the way the author deals with the how the women behaved. I really felt she captured the strength of women without resorting to giving them modern attitudes which often gives the impression that all women were dissatisfied with their lot. Even though women had to answer to their husbands, they accepted this as the natural order of things, and there was a certain comfort to be gained from knowing your place in the world. After the First World War there were some changes in attitudes to the British class system, but for most country people, this was slow in coming, and they would still expect a hierarchy amongst the people who lived around them.
Another aspect of family life that the author captured beautifully was the ingrained sense of loyalty to family. You never took family problems outside of the family and respect always had to be given to elders from one generation to the next. In the book, there are three grandparents who are still supported in one way or another by younger generations of the family, and this was always an important part of life. Families lived within easy reach of one another and many things such as preserved food and handicrafts were shared amongst them. We have lost a lot of that now, and it's tempting to wish it all back, but the message that rings out in the book is that nothing ever stands still and there must always be change for us to survive.
This is a fabulous book and feels so real that by the end it is possible to feel related to all the characters. Ideal for anyone who wants to escape their modern life for a while and plunge into our not so distant past.
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