they had known each other since their childhood days, and he had wanted to marry her but had to go to war and when he came back she was recently married to Herbert, who didn’t fight in the war. Mr Blackett is sure that it won’t happen, and considers predictions of war to be irresponsible and unpatriotic; Rosamund and Miss Spanner are sure it is around the corner.

Initially, Miss Spanner was presented as a lonely spinster who was brought up by very strict parents whose goal it was to raise a person who would take care of them in their old age and be exactly like them (she was allowed very little freedom to do or to think as she pleased) — the father scared a potential suitor of Miss Spanner’s away from the house. The families are the Blacketts and the Frasers, and the time is shortly before the Second World War – though obviously the characters cannot know that it is coming.She was born the daughter of a shipbroker and attended Gateshead Secondary School (a higher grade school later renamed Gateshead Grammar School) and Penrhos College, Colwyn Bay, Wales. The story of the Frasers and the Blacketts, was building up to be an interesting mingling and confrontation of two families, so very different from each other in their conceptual grasp of life, of education, and of politics.

It reminded me very much of Howard's End with two houses and two families - very different but interconnected. He domineers and ruins the lives of those in his family simply by expecting his needs to be more important than theirs, and respectability to be more important than freedom. It was first published in 1947 with World War II and its toll on Britain's young men, as well as on those who remained behind, still fresh and painful.

In reality however, Bertha – who is constantly referred to as Mrs Blackett in the novel – is far smarter than her husband suspects.

H. Young wrote with ironic tenderness — an irony more revealing because of the tenderness — about the rather comfortably off English middle classes.Omnipresent as it was, the march toward war is not very pressing in the lives of the residents of Chatterton Square, nor nearly so engrossing as the changes growing up and growing older bring to each of them.