After a brisk working week, I plan to curl up with tea and a charming old English novel. And I highly recommend Ruth Adam’s delightful novel, A House in the Country (1957), published in the Furrowed Middlebrow series by Dean Street Press.

I adored this little book, which will appeal to fans of E. Nesbit’s The Lark and Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle.

In Adam’s brilliant, funny, autobiographical novel, the narrator falls in love with a country house she can’t afford. And so she and her family invite a group of friends and relatives to share the 33-room house, which includes two kitchens, two cottages, and multiple lush gardens. After sharing a tiny hell-hole of a flat in post-war London, they are thrilled to move to the country. Ruth does the housework while the others work for wages.

They love the house, but it needs a lot of love and work. And without the gardener, Howard, who has lived in a cottage at the manor since he was a page-boy for the old Colonel, they could not have survived.. He knows the ins and outs of village society, understands the ancient boiler and the plumbing, and traffics in everything from bees-wax to a pony (which belongs to a farmer who has been illicitly storing stuff in their outbuildings).

Based on the author’s tenure in a run-down country house, this sweet little book evokes a world of riotously beautiful flowers, humorous mishaps, and post-war shortages . In addition to her husband, who works for the BBC, and the three children, their housemates include a famous stage actress, Diana, Timmy, a broadcaster, Ruth’s brother Bob, who is in the RAF, and Lefty, who’s in the navy.

But they are exasperated when they cannot find any furniture.

Ruth explains,

The summer of 1945 was the worst time in history for buying furniture. You couldn’t get anything new, except on dockets. Diana toyed with the idea of marrying a stage-door-johnnie who was always asking her, because if you got married you got a whole lot of dockets at once.

Not quite sure what dockets are -are they like ration cards? – but they do find treasures at the junk shop. The junk-man refuses to sell it to them. “I can’t get it down today. You’ll have to wait,.” The shop is cram-packed from floor to ceiling but he’s too lazy to move the unwieldy items they want. Fortunately, they discover auctions and house sales, which Ruth (and probably the rest of you) very much enjoy.

I chuckled over this little book and know I will reread it.

Read on! And have a charming weekend!