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.