Book description
Behind the large house, the fragrant camomile lawn stretches down to
the Cornish cliffs. Here, in the dizzying heat of August 1939, five
cousins have gathered at their aunt's house for their annual ritual of
a holiday. For most of them it is the last summer of their youth, with
the heady exhilarations and freedoms of lost innocence, as well as the
fears of the coming war.
The Camomile Lawn moves from Cornwall to London and back
again, over the years, telling the stories of the cousins, their
family and their friends, united by shared losses and lovers, by
family ties and the absurd conditions imposed by war as their paths
cross and recross over the years. Mary Wesley presents an
extraordinarily vivid and lively picture of wartime London: the
rationing, imaginatively circumvented; the fallen houses; the parties,
the new-found comforts of sex, the desperate humour of survival - all
of it evoked with warmth, clarity and stunning wit. And through it
all, the cousins and their friends try to hold on to the part of
themselves that laughed and played dangerous games on that camomile lawn.
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.
