I got this one from Ebay and it’s an original from 1946, I think this is one of the easier Thirkells to get a hold of.

As you would expect it reflects the times it was written in and the characters are all involved with war work and coping with rationing, coupons and black out material.

Miss Bunting, the governess who has been part of the household in many of the better establishments of the county, is helping out with Lady Fielding’s daughter Anne who is deemed to be to delicate to go to the now over-crowded local school.

Although the book is titled Miss Bunting, a large part of it is about the nouveau riche and boorish Sam Adams and his daughter Heather and how they fit into the area.

This is the third Angela Thirkell book which I’ve read and I thoroughly enjoyed it, but this one is by far the one which has most references to things that I think a lot of people nowadays might have difficulty with. There’s quite a lot about politics in it with the then chancellor of the exchequer coming in for abuse, amongst others. The government is always called ‘They’ and it’s as if they have taken over from the Nazis as the big enemy to be dealt with. This must be because the government elected immediately after the war was Labour and the upper classes would have been dead against them.

In fact, there are people who are hankering after the good old days of the war and looking back to the time when the local aristocracy could become a member of parliament for the price of some cakes and ale! But throughout it all Miss Bunting has a recurring nightmare that all of her former pupils are being killed in the war, so many of them already have been, so there are dark moments as well as light-heartedness.

Angela Thirkell used some of the descendants of main characters from Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire and Palliser books in her books, in some of them they are barely mentioned but the 1940s Duke of Omnium and various others crop up quite a bit in Miss Bunting. There’s still plenty of humour in the shape of Gradka, a Mixo-Lydian refugee who runs Hallbury, Fieldings’ home. One ‘joke’ which runs most of the way through the book depends on people mistaking the Italian word ‘loggia’ for the English word ‘lodger’ and I nearly didn’t get that because you have to read it with an English accent!