Mayland Hall by Doreen Wallace – 20 Books of Summer 2024

Mayland Hall by Doreen Wallace was published in 1960. It’s one of my 20 Books of Summer. I had only just read a review of a Doreen Wallace book when this one popped up in a secondhand bookshop, otherwise I may not have bought it, but I’m glad that I did.

The setting is East Anglia, the Sculpher family makes a living from travelling around farms and woodlands of the area, cutting down any trees that the landowners want to be felled. It’s difficult work and the young women of the family are expected to do their fair share of felling too. They all live in ‘vans’ and the younger ones sleep under them, it’s a tough and spartan life.  One of the daughters is apt to lie down in a ditch with any man she can find, and those children are just seen as part of the future workforce by their grandfather. But one night Maud, another daughter doesn’t come home, she has legged it with one of the gentry. Sculpher is incensed.

The focus switches to Mayland Hall where Daniel and Mary Gooderham live.  The Sculphers do occasional work for them. The Gooderhams are ‘county’ people, an ‘old’ family and well-respected. They don’t have a huge amount of ready money but over the years they have built up more and more stocks of land, so they are land wealthy. In their society primogeniture rules, but Daniel’s elder brother had died in World War 2. He had been the one to get the expensive education while younger brothers just went to the local school. Apparently any daughters were also sent to expensive schools, to make them more likely to find a wealthy husband in the future! Janey, the daughter-in-law has cousins who are ‘honourables’ like the Mitfords and it has gone to her head, she’s a horror.

This was a good read, full of social history now as it is 64 years since it was written. It features the Gooderhams worrying about the new Death Tax when Daniel dies, and what they had to do to avoid it. This was something that a Labour government had brought in, in an effort to redistribute wealth. It reminded me that the Death Tax is often mentioned in Angela Thirkell’s books too.

The Outcast Dead by Elly Griffiths

The Outcast Dead cover

The Outcast Dead by Elly Griffiths is the sixth book in her Ruth Galloway series. As Ruth is an archaeologist specialising in bones they usually entail the discovery of a body and this one is no different.

The location of her dig is Norwich Castle which had been a prison in the past. People who had been hanged were buried in the grounds and when the body that Ruth is excavating turns out to have a hook where a hand should be, she’s sure that it’s a locally famous child murderer.

Whilst Ruth is busy with that body her one time lover DCI Harry Nelson is investigating a supposed cot death, but it’s the third such tragedy in the same family and he’s thinking that three times is just too many to be natural.

I enjoyed this one although I’m beginning to wonder what Elly Griffiths has against happy couples as in her books nobody seems to be with the correct partner. I’m not at all sure that that adds much to the reading experience. No doubt it is the sort of thing that creative writing courses suggest as being a good thing to do to introduce conflict, but it can be overdone I think.