Pining for the West

I’ve been neglecting my 2011 Reading List recently. I was supposed to be reading one book a week from it in an effort to eat into the piles of unread books which have been in the house for years but I’m way off course now. I’ll probably catch up when the winter weather hits us though as I can’t do anything in the garden then. This book is one from the list.

The Pursuit of Love was actually a re-read for me as I first read it when I was about 14 but I wanted to read it again before reading Love in a Cold Climate and The Blessing. I’m in a bit of a Mitford phase at the moment after visiting Chatsworth House.

I’m pleased to be able to say that I enjoyed it this time round just as much as before. I still had quite a lot of laugh out loud moments, especially at the antics of Uncle Matthew, the very eccentric aristocrat who was actually based on Nancy’s father. In fact the whole thing is very autobiographical as the Mitford children were actually chased by their father and his bloodhounds across country fields when he wasn’t able to hunt foxes, much to the horror of any witnesses, Nancy Mitford used the experience in this book. If he hadn’t been a rich lord he would definitely have been banged up in prison but the children didn’t seem to have been damaged by it. What am I saying?! Unity was a Nazi, fell for Hitler and shot herself in the head and most of the others were unusual, to say the least.

Anyway, back to the book. The story is narrated by Fanny who is the only child of ‘the Bolter’ and she has been ‘doorstepped’ by her mother shortly after her birth. Aunt Emily brings up Fanny but she spends a lot of time with her large family of cousins, the Radletts.

Linda is the second eldest girl in the Radlett family and she’s desperate to get married as she’s so bored by her life at home. It was a time when girls were expected to get married before they were 21, after which they were deemed to be ‘on the shelf’. At Linda’s ‘coming out’ ball she meets Tony Kroesig who she finds amusing, but unknown to her he’s slightly drunk and so she doesn’t realise that his real personality is very different from her first impression. When Tony proposes marriage Linda jumps at the chance and nobody can dissuade her from it. Her father (Uncle Matthew) is horrified at the thought of having a ‘Hun’ in the family and his attitude makes Linda all the more determined to marry Tony.

Well, I know it doesn’t sound like a barrel of laughs but honestly there are plenty of comedy moments in it and I’m going straight from The Pursuit of Love to the next one in the trilogy – Love in a Cold Climate.

You might know that I can be a bit of a nit-picker where details in books are concerned. So I wasn’t chuffed when Nancy Mitford mentioned the Dunkirk evacuation of the English army. My father-in-law wouldn’t have been amused by that as he was at Dunkirk in that very Scottish regiment the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. She should of course have said British army.