Part Of The Furniture - Couverture souple

Early in 1941, having just seen off at Euston Station the two young men whom she has loved for the best part of her seventeen years, Juno Marlowe is hurrying down a London street with her ill-fitting shoes in her hands. Aeroplanes thunder overhead; a battery of guns opens up. When a stick of bombs falls she cowers, then takes to her heels in flight. She is rescued from this nightmare by a gaunt stranger, frail and older than his years, and, as he guides her up his front stairs, he offers her the protection of his house.

Given this respite from the bleakness of having no home and no family to turn to, Juno encounters first tragedy, then a series of events which take her to a house in the West Country and the blossoming of an English spring into which war only occasionally intrudes. Here she may find peace; here, at last, she will no longer be part of the furniture.

Mary Wesley was born near Windsor in 1912. Her education took her to the London School of Economics and during the War she worked in the War Office. Although she initially fulfilled her parent's expectations in marrying an aristocrat she then scandalised them when she divorced him in 1945 and moved in with the great love of her life, Eric Siepmann. The couple married in 1952, once his wife had finally been persuaded to divorce him. She used to comment that her 'chief claim to fame is arrested development, getting my first novel [Jumping the Queue] published at the age of seventy'. She went on to write a further nine novels, three of which were adapted for television, including the best-selling The Camomile Lawn. Mary Wesley was awarded the CBE in the 1995 New Year's honour list and died in 2002.