One Year’s Time by Angela Milne was first published in 1942, but it has just been reprinted by British Library. I must say that as soon as I started to read this book I turned back to the publishing details to check them out as I could hardly believe what I was reading. The setting is the late 1930s and it begins in London.

Liza had been at a New Year’s party the previous evening and had met Walter there for the first time. She is just about to start painting the floor in her living room when the telephone rings. It’s Walter, he has looked her number up in the phone book and he would like to come round to her place. Liza is keen for him to visit her. To be fair so would I be, anything to postpone having to paint a floor would be a welcome.  But by page 7 they’re in bed!

Liza is a secretary, in a very staid company, and Walter is training to be a barrister, something he’d like to avoid. Very quickly Liza is besotted with him and she’s suppressing all her own wishes, matching her actions to what he wants in life because she’s afraid that she’ll lose him if he realises what she really wants. She knows that he has had lots of affairs in the past, sometimes with married women. Clinging to him would put him right off her.

When Walter announces that he wants to go away to the country and write a book Liza gives up her job to be with him. She pretends she’s his wife and keeps house for him and they strike up a friendship with Kate and Maurice, a married  couple who live nearby. Of course Walter doesn’t even try to write a book, he’s just lazing and reading. It’s an idyllic time for Liza anyway,  despite the fact that she realises that she’s more or less walking on eggshells. She really has to be true to herself if she’s going to find happiness, but spinsterhood is beckoning to her and she’d rather avoid that.

Kate has guessed that they aren’t married, but Liza doesn’t see Kate as being a danger. Walter has given up calling Liza darling and has moved on to calling her ‘ducky’. For me this is a dead giveaway, I’m never keen on people calling their other half ‘darling’ instead of using their name, it smacks of being afraid of calling them by the wrong name, but ducky is definitely a demotion!

This all makes it sound quite grim, but it isn’t. There’s quite a lot of humour in it. Angela Milne was A.A. Milne’s niece and she wrote for Punch.

From a social history point of view this book was a real eye-opener for me as we’ve always been told that the introduction of the Pill in the late 1960s had led to the permissive society, but it seems that there was always a lot more ‘illicit’ sex going on than I would have thought, we can’t blame wartime because the war hadn’t quite started yet.

Thank you to British Library who sent me a copy of the book for review. I really enjoyed it and it’s just a shame that the author never wrote any more books. There could have been a sequel about Walter dodging the war in some way and marrying someone who definitely didn’t race him into bed within 24 hours of meeting him.

As ever with this series there are interesting snippets of information about the decade it was first published and a thoughtful and informative Afterword by Simon Thomas.