The Blessing was first published in 1951 but it’s set in World War II and begins in London. Grace, the daughter of Sir Conrad, is engaged to Hughie who is off fighting in Egypt. When Hughie meets Charles-Edouard de Valhubert in Cairo he stupidly asks him to ‘look up’ Grace while he’s in London. Before she knows what has happened Charles-Edouard has proposed to Grace and they are married. A baby boy, Sigismond, is the result and Grace doesn’t see her husband for seven years as he’s off fighting abroad and isn’t demobbed until 1947.

When her husband does eventually turn up he whisks them off to France to meet his family. Everything is strange to Grace but she falls in love with France and she’s completely clueless about the society which she has been thrown into. When Charles-Edouard moves them to Paris he immediately resumes his affair with Albertine an old flame of his. There’s a lot of bed-hopping going on as you would expect in France. When Grace finds out, she’s not amused, who could blame her!

I didn’t enjoy this one all that much mainly because Grace is the only likeable character in it. Her husband is an arrogant, lazy, philandering scumbag, he’s everything that gives French people a bad name.

Their son Sigismond must be one of the most ghastly, manipulative children in fiction. I’m afraid the mummy in me couldn’t stand that and I longed to give him a good skelp on his bahookie, very un-p.c. of me I know but it wouldn’t half have sorted him out! What I would have done to Charles-Edouard is unprintable!

It’s a bit of a worry really as Nancy Mitford’s books tend to be very autobiographical and she did live with a Frenchman in France for a number of years. I suspect that Gaston Palewski led her a dance. According to a very elderly lady friend of mine who has had experience of living in a Scottish village which was ‘taken by storm’ by the Polish army, a French/Polish husband would be a disaster for a woman expecting fidelity. My theory is it gives them something to confess to their priests about! For me The Blessing was the least enjoyable book of the three which I’ve recently read.

What can I say – that Presbyterianism upbringing never leaves you!