Stories and films set in stately homes continue to fascinate us, and Lissa Evans’s latest novel is likely to increase our appetite. It is 1945, and Dimperley Manor, the large, dilapidated home of the Vere-Thissetts near Aylesbury, has been almost emptied of its wartime evacuees. Only the widowed Zena Baxter (who adores Dimperley) and her small daughter remain, and the place has become a millstone round the neck of the heir, Valentine. The new baronet is expected to marry a rich bride to save his ancestral home. The nation, battered and bloodied, has just voted overwhelmingly for Labour. Is it a new dawn or a disaster?
All this might seem familiar to fans of Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse, Hannah Rothschild and Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn. The mad relations living under one giant leaky roof, the shabby furnishings, brown tap water and discomforts of being cash-poor, snobbish and servantless are what render the subjects of class and property entertaining. But in the hands of Evans, one of our finest writers of literary entertainment, this all becomes more than an exercise in nostalgia. The second world war formed the background of her previous novels, including Their Finest (which was successfully filmed in 2016) and V for Victory. Here she shows how the war’s disruption to ordinary lives prepared the ground for everything in today’s Britain, from the welfare state to feminism. Soldiers are being demobbed and the age of Attlee has replaced that of Churchill, signalling change that will continue into our own time.
Inevitably, Dimperley’s aristocrats are mildly satirised. Their foibles and ineptitude are seen through the eyes of Zena, a tough, poor, practical single mother with a gift for organisation.
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