Tag Archives: Helen Simonson

The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club by Helen Simonson – 20 Books of Summer

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Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club by Helen Simonson  is another of my 20 Books of Summer although it wasn’t on my original list which has had to be amended somewhat. This one was a request from the library.

It begins in 1919 in fictional Hazelbourne-on-Sea in the south of England. It’s a tough time for women as those who have been working during the war are having to give up their jobs so that the returning soldiers can have them. Constance Haverhill finds herself surplus to requirements at her family home as her parents are dead, her brother has inherited the farm and his wife doesn’t want Constance around. The estate where Constance worked during the war have got rid of her which means she is homeless as well as jobless, she’s lucky to have found work as a lady’s companion to an old family friend who is convalescing at a hotel.

The hotel is a popular meeting place for Poppy Wirrall, she’s the daughter of a baronet and during the war she and a group of women had flown aeroplanes from factories to the airfields. Now they can only drive motorbikes, they’ve set up a taxi company for women only, with sidecars for the passengers.

This was a good read. It features lots of the social problems that came with the end of World War 1. The lack of men for women to marry as so many had been killed in the war, the horror of severely damaged men both physically and mentally,  the problem of suddenly having no work for women after they had become used to being wage earners throughout the war years, and then the new laws which favoured the returning soldiers.

That makes it all sound a bit grim but there is some romance and light-heartedness in there too. This is the third book by Simonson that I’ve read, I’ve enjoyed them all, I’ve just had a look at my blogpost of her second book Before the War and I ended it by writing:

Snobbery, racism, prejudice, bitchiness, family strife – all the usual nastiness that goes to make up almost any society of human beings in fact – appear in each of Helen Simonson’s books.

That’s true of this one as well.

 

The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson

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The Summer Before the War cover

I really enjoyed Helen Simonson’s book Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand recently so I decided to read her new one The Summer Before the War. It’s quite a chunkster at 580 pages and when I got it from the library I was a bit daunted because I have so many books to read, but the print is quite big so it didn’t take me as long as I thought it would to read it. I can’t say that I enjoyed this one as much as Major Pettigrew though, and I was slightly disappointed that it was so radically different from her first book, but it did grow on me.

The setting is Rye, East Sussex, 1914. That summer was of course a famously beautiful one. Hugh and Daniel are cousins who have a close relationship with their Aunt Agatha and Uncle John, a childless couple who are well-heeled, John is something big in the Foreign Office and so is party to all of the political goings on between Britain and Germany.

Agatha has persuaded the local school board to employ a young woman to teach Latin, but this has made Agatha some enemies. It’s a godsend though for the teacher Beatrice Nash who has been left with virtually nothing to live on after the death of her father as he had not trusted her with the control of her inheritance from him, and has tied it all up under the control of unsympathetic relatives.

As war becomes a reality the town becomes a safe harbour for Belgian refugees, but not everyone is welcoming and it transpires that one young woman has suffered more than others from the attentions of German soldiers.

The subject matter is of course a lot heavier than the first Simonson book and I felt that this book dragged slightly towards the middle, but that may just have been because I didn’t have so much time for reading for a while and didn’t get through it as quickly as I would have liked. In fact the themes of the book are very similar to those of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, they’re just taking place 100 years earlier. There are some really good characters though.

Snobbery, racism, prejudice, bitchiness, family strife – all the usual nastiness that goes to make up almost any society of human beings in fact – appear in each of Helen Simonson’s books. I enjoyed it, just not as much as her first book.

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson

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Major Pettigrew's Last Stand cover

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson was first published in 2010 and it has been popular amongst bloggers which is understandable as it’s an enjoyable read with some great characters.

Major Pettigrew is a 68 year-old widower of some years standing and he has one son who is rather self-absorbed and snooty. When the major’s younger brother dies suddenly it throws him into a bit of a spin. It’s a bit of a wake up call, he should grab life while he can, he has been lonely and he realises that Mrs Ali, the owner of the local shop is becoming more than just a friend to him. Despite being completely different from each other on the surface, the major and Mrs Ali actually have a lot in common, they have a love of books and literature and they were both born in India, the part now known as Pakistan.

Mrs Ali has problems of her own, widowed and childless she really has no standing and respect within her wider family. She is expected to hand over her business with her home attached to it to her nephew, while she moves in as unpaid servant and child/granny minder to her extended family.

With a setting of the Cotswolds and a cast of well recognised local types, gossiping, narrow minded, snooty, racist and bitchy, there’s plenty to entertain you in this book.

The blurb on the front says: ‘A beautiful little love story’ Alexander McCall Smith.

Have any of you read anything else by Helen Simonson?