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‘A Utopia of tea-parties, dinner-parties . . .’ | Period Piece

‘A Utopia of tea-parties, dinner-parties . . .’ | Period Piece

Greetings from somewhere between Hoxton and Cromer as we journey to East Anglia for our summer soirée at The Holt Bookshop in Norfolk this evening. For this week’s news we thought we’d make a stop in Cambridge along the way, and transport you to Gwen Raverat’s childhood home in an old mill house on the Backs along the river Cam where ‘there was plenty to see; nearly all the life of Cambridge flowed backwards and forwards over our bridge, and before our house’.
Muriel was at a crossroads | The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley Extract

Muriel was at a crossroads | The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley Extract

Muriel was at a crossroads. Something would have to be done, but what? Roger had urged her to ‘let things slide a little longer’. Since then things had indeed slid. She was ill throughout all her pregnancies, worried almost beyond endurance, deeply ashamed, sick and perpetually tired. The longed-for escape from her past that Roger had brought about had simply landed her in a prison of domesticity that every fibre of her being cried out was wrong for her. Instinct told her that she wasn’t meant for this. Before she found Roger she had been fortified in the belief that one day ‘something’ would happen to save her. And something had happened. But instead of walking out into a paradise of freedom she’d walked straight into a trap. She might just as well have gone into a prison cell and closed the door behind her.
Period Piece Extract | ‘It was a Utopia of tea-parties, dinner-parties, boat-races, lawn-tennis, antique shops, picnics . . .’

Period Piece Extract | ‘It was a Utopia of tea-parties, dinner-parties, boat-races, lawn-tennis, antique shops, picnics . . .’

In the spring of 1883 my mother, Maud Du Puy, came from America to spend the summer in Cambridge with her aunt, Mrs Jebb. She was nearly twenty-two, and had never been abroad before; pretty, affectionate, self-willed, and sociable; but not at all a flirt. Indeed her sisters considered her rather stiff with young men. She was very fresh and innocent, something of a Puritan, and with her strong character, was clearly destined for matriarchy.
Richard Hillary | The Last Enemy *30 copies left*

Richard Hillary | The Last Enemy *30 copies left*

Richard Hillary was a charming, good-looking and rather arrogant young man, fresh from public school and Oxford, when, like many of his friends, he abandoned university to train as a pilot on the outbreak of war in 1939. At the flying training school, meeting men who hadn’t enjoyed the same gilded youth as he had, his view of the world, and of himself, began to change. In 1940, during the Battle of Britain, he shot down five German aircraft and was finally shot down in flames himself, sustaining terrible burns to his face and hands.

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