Tag Archives: Rosamond Lehman

Dusty Answer by Rosamond Lehmann

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Dusty Answer cover

Dusty Answer by Rosamond Lehmann was first published in 1927 but has been reprinted fairly recently I think, I had never heard of it before I saw a 1946 copy of it in an Edinburgh secondhand bookshop. I’ve enjoyed a few of her books previously so it came home with me. It was the first book that Lehman had published.

This is a coming of age tale, at the beginning of the book Judith is 18 years old and has just noticed that the house next door is being spruced up, it looks like it’s going to be put on the market soon. The house has been empty for years, but Judith had been very much enamoured with the slightly older children, a family of five cousins who used to live there and had befriended Judith years before. As Judith was an only lonely child she had been thrilled to be in the company of the cousins.

We’re told early on that the eldest cousin Charlie has been killed in World War 1, he had been everyone’s favourite, especially with their grandmother and she had shut up the house and moved away. Just as Judith was getting ready to go up to Cambridge the cousins unexpectedly appear at the house again, but she’s able to meet up with some of them while she’s at Cambridge.

The book was seen as being quite shocking in its day, with Judith having an affair with another female student. I imagine that that did quite a lot for the sales back in 1927, but it’s Lehmann’s later books which I’ve been more familiar with. This was an enjoyable read, I really like her writing style but I’m quite surprised that Dusty Answer isn’t as well known as her later books.

The Love-charm of Bombs by Lara Feigel

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The Love-charm of Bombs cover

The Love-charm of Bombs by Lara Feigel is subtitled Restless Lives in the Second World War and it’s mainly about the lives of authors during the war – Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Rose Macaulay, Rosamond Lehmann, Henry Yorke, Hilde Spiel and various others pop in and out. I think that it’s well known that when people think that today might be their last day on earth they throw caution to the wind and grab what life they can – while they can. All of the authors survived the London blitz of August 1940 and were really in the thick of it having volunteered as ambulance people, firemen, ARP wardens and the like and it seems they really grew to love the excitement of it all. They were just about all promiscuous so this book might come as a shock to those who thought that such sex didn’t exist before the 1960s.

I found the first section of this book to be the most interesting as it’s about the bombing and their experiences, when things settled down and the Nazis turned their attention elsewhere they found life to be rather tame and mundane, the war was just a hard slog and as the authors written about in this book were all rather well off they didn’t have to worry about rationing as most people did, they could always get what they wanted.

There are lots of excerpts from books written by the people involved in this book, but what struck me was considering they were all successful published authors it’s a pity that they had to live the books before they wrote them, instead of using their imagination. Most of them seem to have used their various affairs for copy, they wrote copious love letters to each other but as soon as their backs were turned they were sleeping with someone else and in the case of Graham Greene even habitually using brothels. Yet again I’m puzzled as to why he converted to Roman Catholicism when he had no intention of keeping to the rules, in fact he loved flouting them. Maybe he got a kick out of confessing his sins to priests. But if so then he was sadly mistaken because one of the female authors in this book habitually had affairs with the priests that she had as ‘spiritual advisers’. Honestly it’s all too much for my Presbyterian sensibilities to cope with!

The book carries on into the 1950s when ill health was catching up with a lot of the people involved. For me interest in this book fell off after the early years of the war. I must say that having known a man who was a conscientious objector in WW2 and ended up being an ambulanceman in London, I know that his job was much more harrowing than is portrayed in this book, and his experiences were even worse than those of many servicemen. While others were clearing up rubble and broken glass the ambulancemen cleared up bits of bodies that had been blown all over the place – such as up trees and onto roofs.

Anyway, I’ve digressed-ish, this is quite an interesting read if you read books by these 1930-50s authors, I have to admit that I had never even heard of Henry Yorke and Hilde Spiel, but they were loosely part of the same milieu. I’m quite puzzled by the title of the book because all of those involved were in no need of a war to pep up their sex lives, although it did give them more scope to get on with their infidelities.

After the war Hilde Spiel went back to Germany and Austria and that was interesting, she had done her best to assimilate in England and had been fairly successful. She had had to escape from Austria when the Nazis marched in and she had a harder time socialising with the Germans than the British people had.

I also found the bits about the neutrality of Ireland during the war interesting. Apart from other things apparently they were afraid of being bombed! Rose Macaulay was very lucky in that being Anglo-Irish she had inherited a ‘Big House’ so she was able to go there whenever the bombing in London got too much for her. She was a strange person who believed that she had been accepted by the Irish as being Irish and even had affairs with I.R.A. gunmen, but in reality the fact that she saw herself as being wholly Irish just meant that she was clueless as to how others saw her.

This book is interesting in parts but at 465 pages I felt it dragging in the middle.