Staying Put

Felicity plunged in with a torch and looked round. "Heavens! What a mess! How absolutely thrilling! We've actually been bombed, Mummy! Isn't it marvellous? Absolutely!"

In the best tradition of village-goes-to-war novels like Angela Thirkell's Cheerfulness Breaks In or Ursula Orange's Tom Tiddler's Ground, Dorothy Lambert here shows us the quintessentially zany English village of Swansford dragged into the early days of World War II.

Widowed Lavinia Falcon has determined that Swansford must dive right into the war effort. Her prickly older daughter Rowena heads out to war work (albeit with the primary goal of snagging a wealthy husband) and son Richard joins the R.A.F., leaving Lavinia and her flirtatious younger daughter Felicity doing their part at home. They are aided by a brilliant cast of village irregulars-Lady Bulstrode, who threatens to steal Lavinia's thunder in the war work arena; the appropriately-named Miss Dampier, who never fails to share dampening visions of the future; Admiral Ramsbottom, a frisky middle-aged Lothario; the Driscolls, a rather tumultuous Irish family; and, best of all, the gloriously dithering Mrs. Beckett, who rambles and confuses herself and strews mayhem in her wake. And if "staying put" still sounds uneventful, the delirious chaos that erupts when Felicity interrupts her mother's sewing party with a report of a possible lurking spy will leave you in no doubt of Swansford's whole-hearted (if slightly daft) commitment to the defence of England.

Originally published in 1941, this new edition features a new introduction by twentieth-century women's historian Elizabeth Crawford.