The Camomile Lawn

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The house belongs to aunt Helena, who really isn't anybody's aunt. Uncle Richard, who lost his leg in the Great War and never stops talking about (and who is everybody's uncle), is Helena's second husband. Holiday is filled with pleasure and innocent games, loves and infatuations. Written in 1984 the language is obviously not quite contemporary, but see past that and you will find a beautifully crafted novel, full of surprises, twists and turns, which will keep you guessing until the end. The novel begins in 1939, as war is about to break out. The setting is a house in Cornwall, high above the sea, that possesses an unusual camomile lawn. There are a lot of main characters who interact in many and varied ways: five cousins, their Aunt and Uncle, identical boy twins, sons of the local Rector, who become friends with the cousins, and a husband and wife - Austrian Jewish Refugees who assume an increasingly important role as the story unfolds.

Cornwall, August 1939. Cousins Oliver, Calypso, Polly and Walter meet up every summer at their Uncle Richard's beautiful coastal house which is set on the cliff edge and has a remarkable camomile lawn. Richard's wife Helena grudgingly accepts this annual invasion of HER house by her husband's nieces and nephews, excepting Sophy, Richard's young niece who now lives with them permanently and was not part of the bargain when she married him and whom Helena dislikes quite a lot. The local rector has twin sons, David and Paul and has taken in Jewish refugees Max and Monika Erstweiler, all of whom visit the Cuthbertson house frequently. Max and Monika's son Pauli is being held in a concentration camp as he did not manage to escape with his parents.

Carole Boyd's narration had the right accents and tone for the middle class characters. Her narration was unobtrusive and didn't have any jarring moments of misread words or phrases. The author has no comment to make; she just tells how it was. Since she never explains anything, the novel may need footnotes in another 50 years explaining the topical references - to Suzanne Lenglen, the tennis champion, and to the Gargoyle Club, where Polly points out and names to Oliver the famous real-life literary and theatrical habitués. And why does Helena, offering in war-torn London to prepare "the greens" for supper with her sister-in-law, assert that "I know how to do it"? After all, she is a middle-aged woman and runs a household herself. The point is that before the war they would all have had maids and cooks, who have now pushed off joyfully to support the war effort in munitions factories or the services. The lives of upper-middle-class women would never be the same again. There was a comfortable life for the upper middle class that the war changed. Women didn't have to do things for themselves as they had maids, etc. It was also before children and women were bombarded with sexual images, and such frank talk wasn't always understood by innocent ears. We see this come into play quite a bit, not to say some of the characters aren't randy, just that a woman or a child wasn't as knowledgeable with the terms nor the act itself. It also plays strange because there is so much sex between this cast of characters, everyone using there sexuality for different purposes. This is a wartime story, largely set in Cornwall and London during the days immediately before WWII and the following six years, as we watch different generations deal with going to war, sending loved ones off, managing with privation and bombardment and lives turned up side down as well as changing behavioral codes. War changed lives in so many ways. The heartbreak at the core of this supremely entertaining novel is the way "that" becomes "this", the way that gorgeous young girls become peculiar old women, and the way that the next generation - Polly's twins, Calypso's Hamish, Max and Monika's horrible Pauli - cannot know, nor care quite enough, about their parents and their extraordinary lives and loves. "I should have thought," says Polly's young adult son, "that in the war, with the bombing and so on, there wasn't much time for private life." Polly tells him he is so wrong, "We lived intensely. It was a very happy time." But in the war Polly also knew sadness, loneliness, loss. (Ceci n'empêche pas cela). The children, however, don't get it. It is not their fault. "I bore you as Uncle Richard bored us," Polly tells them in the car.

Here is a novel which is of a very particular type, it’s almost (but not) a self-parody of the clipped we-don’t-do-emotion (well, we do, but we don’t go on about it) British School of No Nonsense. It’s about a family of cousins and others surviving or not through World War Two. They’re all fairly posh. They know how to tell a good claret from a bad one. They’re the lower level of the upper crust. Calypso was the glamorous niece, lusted after by Oliver, but she was determined to marry a rich man. Polly was in love with twins, between whom she could not choose. Sophy was 12years old, all eyes and ears. A couple of refugee Jews who joined the party became an integral part of the group and relations between the members of this cast were almost incestuous. Calypso found a rich husband, Hector, and then proceeded to be very generous with her favours to all and sundry. Virtue and fidelity was in short supply amongst old and young alike. The first time I have heard about this book was during a BBC Radio 4 dramatization, which the first broadcast, was in October 2007. By coincidence, this series is available again at BBC Radio 4 Extra. The scented camomile lawn at the house by the sea was, for the cousins, the emblem and essence of summer holidays. Some readers may wonder what a camomile lawn is like, even though they drink camomile tea and recognise the fragrance. Camomile, or chamomile, has feathery leaves, a daisy-like flower, and is in fact quite hard to establish as a lawn. (The variety which flourished in Helena and Richard's garden was probably the non-flowering "Treneague", best suited for the purpose and native to the west country.) Sophy, in her 50s and unmarried, remembers at the end "being part of the group which had dined on the lawn on one of the last days of August 1939, sitting round a table lit by candles, with the moon rising over the sea". She may yet get her heart's desire, though that too is suggested with a bitter twist. Like her, anyone who reads this novel must be in love with Oliver, whether at 19 or in his 60s. The book is more than a comedy of manners, more than a sexual entertainment, more than a powerful evocation of the war years, though it is all of those things. With her light touch and uncensored imaginative range, Mary Wesley illuminates the violence and vividness of youth, the griefs and losses of age, the transience of life and of all the people and places we best know and love.Then comes the War. Men go to service, women contribute to the war effort in the top secret offices, there are supply shortages, coupons for clothes, air raids and telegraphs about killed and lost in action. Despite all that, life doesn't stop. On the contrary, life goes on and develops in most unexpected ways. Peacetime rules don't apply, vicinity of death makes everyone, young and old, look for happiness where it can be found and not, where the conventions suggest it should be…. Other characters come into play in the novel, particularly the Jewish refugees. In the story, the rectors wife doesn't believe Hitler is doing such horrible things to the Jews. Such horrors unimaginable to someone with a kind heart. It is a true account of the thinking of the times, an innocence to horrors. The rector also has twin sons that have always been a part of the group of cousins.

Meet the new faces of local currency". Western Morning News. 28 May 2014. Archived from the original on 10 August 2014. The Camomile Lawn achieved unprecedented viewing figures for Channel 4, its success not exceeded until Humans was broadcast more than twenty years later. [3] Musical score [ edit ] Set in Cornwall just prior to WWII, London in 1939, and latterly in late 1970s, it is the story of a group of cousins, their parents, uncles and aunts and also two Jewish refugees. Their lives, how they cope and react to the effects of the war; their lives and their loves make for an eye-opening, interesting and entertaining read. The title is drawn from a camomile lawn between the house and the sea cliffs on which some significant events take place.In the beginning of this book, five cousins - Calypso, Walter, Polly, Oliver, Sophy and the twins - are spending their holiday in their aunt house in a town in Cornwall. Their favorite place during this last summer holiday before the beginning of World War II was the beautiful camomile lawn. Polly is intelligent and practical, and when the Second World War breaks out in September 1939 she joins the War Office to work for Military intelligence, while her brother Walter joins the Royal Navy, Oliver the army, and the twins the Royal Air Force. Meanwhile, Max and Monika are interned as enemy aliens. Calypso marries Hector Grant, a Scottish landowner and member of parliament, but has many affairs. The Erstweilers are released, and Helena begins an affair with Max, and Richard with Monika. Walter is killed at sea, and Calypso has a son, Hamish, shortly after her London house has been hit by a bomb, with Sophy acting as midwife. Pauli Erstweiler is reported to have died in Dachau, but in fact survives the war. For modern readers there are surprises, though there is no reason to doubt Wesley's memory of how it was. The cousins are 19, going on 20, and seem sophisticated. The F-word is used without inhibition. Yet Calypso has to have explained what an erection is. And surely no 10-year-old today would be ignorant of what she was seeing, as Sophy was, when a strange man showed her a "pink snake". There is a terrible pathos in her efforts, always interrupted, to tell people what happened. Her innocence is in some ways a protection. Uncle Richard's gropings in her adolescence seem to her "not awful", but just "a bore" and, while everyone is watchfully aware of his proclivities, any idea of rebuking him or, still less, informing on him is never remotely considered. The Camomile Lawn is a television adaptation of the 1984 book of the same name by Mary Wesley, produced by Glenn Wilhide and Sophie Belhetchet at ZED Ltd for Channel 4, directed by Peter Hall. It was adapted from Wesley's novel by Ken Taylor and first broadcast in 1992. It was nominated for the BAFTA TV Award for Best Drama Serial in 1993. I received this book as a digital ARC from the publisher through Net Galley in return for an honest review.