Customer Reviews
A wonderful book - By: Ms. Sf Taylor, 10 Jun 2008 
This is truly a wonderful book that I have read on several occasions.
Mary Wesley is a fabulous writer.
Great Holiday Read - By: Ken Woodmixer, 04 Jan 2008 
I read this book on holidayin Cornwall & couldn't put it down. There are quite a few characters to get used to, but once you have done that they all grow on you (some more than others). The author writes from experience & you believe every word on the page. The book starts just as war is declared & you know that their world is about to changed forever. They go off to war, some survive some die, they get married & divorced & have affairs, they have children. The book follows them through the ups & downs of the privilidgedin London & jumps back & forwardin time to a funeral being held. I really enjoyed this book & would recommend it.
A quick and easy but enjoyable read - By: Alianor, 18 Oct 2007 This novel, which was made into a TV miniseriesin the early 1990s, incorporates many themes & elements of plot which reappearin other Mary Wesley novels: unconventional relationships, heroines with names derived from ancient mythology, twins & cousins, motherhood, love arriving latein life, & the life-changing experience of living through the Second World War on the home front. It's a quick & easy read, involving but not too taxing, with plot developments which may occasionally strain credulity but characters who are fully-fleshed, unconventional & ready to seize whatever opportunities their lives bring.
Snort - By: K. Malone, 28 Jun 2006 
I remember seeing Mary Wesley interviewed about 'The Camomile Lawn' & saying someone had told her it 'captured exactly how life was lived duing the 1940s'.
I told my mother that (who was a young woman herself during the '40s) & she snorted, 'Not the sort of life WE cared to live, thank you very much!'
The intensity of life in war-time. - By: Ralph Blumenau, 20 Jun 2006 
The book opens on the very eve of the Second World War, with five cousins on holiday at the Cornish home of their Aunt Helena & Uncle Richard (all upper middle class). Four of them (two young women, two young men) are aged 19 or 20, the fifth is Sophy who is just ten. There are also the twin sons of the local rector, who has also takenin a Jewish refugee couple, Max & Monika, from Austria. The novel traces the lives principally of these eleven characters during the war, much of it setin London. Under the intensity of lifein war-time, the young people lose any conventional inhibitions they might possibly have had under other circumstances. (I say `possibly', because uninhibited behaviour had been the mark of certain young socialitesin the 1920s). One can hardly keep track of the sexual permutations & combinations between them. Even middle-aged Uncle Richard & Aunt Helena have unorthodox liaisons. It is all rather rackety, &in the first half of the novel one feels the characters are driven more by sensuality than by anything deeper, with emotions only superficially engaged. Butin the end they do become more deeply involved emotionally; some psychological complexities then emerge (especially for Helena & Calypso) & the reader's sympathies slowly become engaged with them. Most of the story is told as a war-time narrative; but at the end of some chapters we move on forty years or so, when those who are then still alive are converging for Max's funeral & look back on those years; so we learn something about what has happened to them since.
Some of the characters come more alive than othersin the book. Especially successful, I think, is the portrait of Uncle Richard, for the most part just avoiding caricature. Calypso, the eldest of the cousins, & Sophy, the youngest, have some personality, as do Max & Monika; some other characters are not rounded out at all. All of them talkin short laconic sentences (the greater part of the book consists of dialogue), & only Richard, Max & Monika have a way of speaking which isin any way distinctive.
There is humourin this book & pathos; it shows that the intensity of war-time life brought its pleasures as well as its sorrows. It is a good read, but I think it lacks the subtlety of a great novel.
