Book description
Seventeen-year-old Juno Marlowe has just waved off to war the two
young men she has loved for the best part of her life when the air
raid sirens begin to wail out across London. She is rescued from this
nightmare by a gaunt stranger called Evelyn, frail and older than his
years, who offers her the protection of his house and his family
before dying suddenly in the night.
Determined to avoid being sent to Canada to join her mother and new
step-father, and still grieving for her lost lovers, Juno instead
finds herself on a train to Cornwall in search of Evelyn's family.
There she discovers the blossoming of an English spring into which the
war only occasionally intrudes and finds at last a peace for herlself
and a world in which she is more than simply part of the furniture.
Mary Wesley was born near Windsor in 1912. Her education took her to
the London School of Economics and during the War she worked in the War
Office. Although she initially fulfilled her parent's expectations in
marrying an aristocrat she then scandalised them when she divorced him
in 1945 and moved in with the great love of her life, Eric Siepmann. The
couple married in 1952, once his wife had finally been persuaded to
divorce him. She used to comment that her 'chief claim to fame is
arrested development, getting my first novel [
Jumping the Queue
] published at the age of seventy'. She went on to write a further nine
novels, three of which were adapted for television, including the
best-selling
The Camomile Lawn
. Mary Wesley was awarded the CBE in the 1995 New Year's honour list and
died in 2002.
