Tea and Cakes

I finished this a week or so ago now, but have’t got around to writing it up. This was great. She wrote it between 1950 and 1965, so whenever she talks about “how things are now”, it’s really how things were 50 years ago, and she’s geerally comparing things in that present to when she grew up round the turn of the last century. So yes, it’s about growing up fairly well off in Victorian England - and how when money was short they just rented their house out and spent the summer on the continent, which was cheaper. I was really born 78 years too late.
Anyway, as well as talking about that, she also goes into detail about how she became a writer, and how she writes, where she gets her stories from, and how to go about getting stuff published. She also worked in a hospital pharmacy during the war. Oh, and was into archaeology, helping her husband dig important sites in Iraq, unearthing treasures that have no doubt been destroyed over the last couple of years.

So, quite an interesting life, and an interesting book. Oh, I loved that she knew that what she wrote was popular fiction - she didn’t try to dress it up as anything more worthy - it was what it was. So unpretentious.