My Turn to Make the Tea

by Monica Dickens

Poppy, newly recruited cub reporter at the Downingham Post, is determined to prove to the editor that he's wrong in his belief that 'Women are a nuisance in the office'. He certainly doesn't think she's a nuisance when it's time for the tea round - a job which never fails to fall to the only female reporter.
What Poppy lacks in experience, she makes up for in spirit and ambition. She'll make the Downingham Post the best regional newspaper there is - even if she occasionally gets the names wrong in court hearings. Life, for a single professional woman in the post-war years, certainly has its challenges - from finding a room, when the tyrannical landlady doesn't consider Poppy to be quite respectable, to changing her editor's deeply entrenched ways. This semi-autobiographical novel, recounted with Monica Dickens's wit, warmth and wry observation, will charm all who read it.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, British Literature, Humor, Biography

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1951

About the author

From the publisher: MONICA DICKENS, born in 1915, was brought up in London and was the great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens. Her mother's German origins and her Catholicism gave her the detached eye of an outsider; at St Paul's Girls' School she was under occupied and rebellious. After drama school she was a debutante before working as a cook. One Pair of Hands (1939), her first book, described life in the kitchens of Kensington. It was the first of a group of semi autobiographies of which Mariana (1940), technically a novel, was one. 'My aim is to entertain rather than instruct,' she wrote. 'I want readers to recognise life in my books.' In 1951 Monica Dickens married a US naval officer, Roy Stratton, moved to America and adopted two daughters. An extremely popular writer, she involved herself in, and wrote about, good causes such as the Samaritans. After her husband died she lived in a cottage in rural Berkshire, dying there in 1992.
http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/page...

Reviews

[Petra X · Rating 1 out of 5]

I always approach a prolific author who is new to me with great enthusiasm. If I like the book, there will be so many more to enjoy. But this one let me down.

It was dreary, parochial, and each chapter had a neat ending as if the author was writing for a mildly amusing tv sitcom. It was almost Readers' Digest snippets of life, each rounded off in a satifying and positive way to give you something to talk about over dinner. People still had dinner back then. Now we eat in front of the tv. They didn't have tv dinners and sitcoms in the UK back when the author was writing.

I didn't finish it, and I'm never going to finish it. Just boring, boring, boring.

Recommended to those who read to go to sleep. It's very soporific.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the reasons I picked this book up was because it's an old Foyles Bookclub edition that I found in Camden Market. The jacket cover is yellowed and brittle with a fantastic 1950's drawing of a girl bringing a tea tray in to a trio of stereotypical newspaper men. Between that and the title I was hooked. But I'm so glad I let the book-as-object draw me in. (I love my Kindle but let's face it - this is what real bookies like us love, right? The look and feel and smell of a book that says "Read Me!")

Monica Dickens (Charles' great-grand daughter) spent a few years post WWII as a reporter for a English small town local paper. When she wasn't making tea (which of course she had to do as the "girl" in the office!) she was reporting the various petty small town dramas, vying for a spot at the paper's only typewriter and making a life for herself at the boarding house where she rented a room. Semi-autobiographical, the story doesn't really have a plot but describes the quaint old fashioned life of a journalist in the 50's and is wholly entertaining when describing the antics of the boarding house clan. Every chapter is some new escapade and seen through Monica's eyes there is a bit of golden nostalgia about the shared bath, the suspected haunted room and the suspected communist neighbor making me wish that I could have rented the front room and spent nights drinking with the girls while we washed our nylons in the sink.

Although she's been on my radar for a while, this was my first Monica Dickens book and after doing a quick google search I realize she's written quite a lot! I will definitely be scouring the markets for more old editions of her work.

[Jana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Things I did not know until reading this: Charles Dickens had a great-granddaughter. She was also a writer. Her book, My Turn To Make The Tea, is a witty work of fiction about a woman working in a small town newspaper. Monica herself had a very similar job and this book plus two others are considered autobiographical. Even more than the scenes from the newspaper - which are delightful! - I enjoyed the boarding house characters who became temporary family, for better or worse.

There are laughs on every page. The book was published in 1951, so I'm guessing this is set in the 1940s? Life, attitudes, EVERYTHING was so different then. Reading about her on Wikipedia makes me only like her more.

For a little taste of her writing, I present this from page 175 in my very beat up Penguin copy (which I dearly love, and thank you Chris for passing it along to me!):

This was a job for the junior reporter, so it was always the job for me. There is nothing I don't know now about village fetes. I have seen them in blazing sunshine when the ice cream had to be poured into the cornets, and the pig that was being bowled for collapse from heat stroke. I have seen them in pouring rain, when the Rose Queen ran for shelter with a mackintosh over her head, and the tea tent came down like a wet sack on the vicar and most of his parish. I have seen them in a high wind, with boy scouts hanging on to the guy ropes, and I was privileged to be present on one occasion when the sausage rolls had gone off and people were laid out right and left with cramps. The St John Ambulance Brigade were beside themselves from excitement, for Steeple Bracken had not seen so many bodies lying about since a minor skirmish was fought there during the Wars of the Roses.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this (probably fictionalized) memoir, Monica Dickens recounts her time as a journalist at a provincial newspaper (the lowest ranking reporter, and the only woman; thus it's always her turn to make the tea). I enjoyed this more than her earlier autobiographical effort , One Pair of Hands (about her time taking a break from debutante life to go slumming in domestic service), and may actually keep this one, but as was the case with the earlier book, I found her tone condescending. Although it's never made explicit why she has taken on this job in the first place, it's apparent that she sees herself as a sort of anthropologist, investigating the culture of the newspaper office and provincial life seen through its lens, which is well and good, but it seems to me she needn't have sneered quite so much. The subject is interesting though, and I was engaged throughout and sometimes even amused, as at this passage:

"It was now also the season for horse shows. These were not popular among reporters because they went on for so long and there was such a list of names to get right. A lot of the children had tricky double-barrelled names, and their horses were worse."

But even when I was chuckling a little, I noted that nearly every sentence or paragraph has a complaint laced in it somewhere. A good part of the book concerns little dramas and character studies of the other lodgers at her boarding house. Some of the unexpected camaraderie she finds here (among characters rather more vivid than the newspaper men in the office who I found indistinguishable from each other) makes for fun reading, but she also goes out of her way to emphasize the dreariness and squalor of the environment, and there are some unpleasant situations described in a light off-hand way, as though played for humor, an uneasy mix which I found off-putting.

The book interested me enough, that despite not being at all sure if I truly like Monica Dickens, I find myself wanting to seek out her straight autobiography, An Open Book, to see if it will reveal how much of this one is true.

[Jean · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was far more pleasing than the last Monica Dickens' book I read. It was a fictional tale of the years she spent as a junior reporter in a provincial newspaper. It was written in a light-hearted and humorous style and I enjoyed it.

[Dianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an author I was completely unaware of until I started blogging. I was surprised and excited to find out she is the great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens. You can't go wrong with writing genes like that. I've read lots of glowing reviews of Ms. Dickens' books and was lucky enough to find "My Turn To Make The Tea" at the library. Could a book have a better title? I think not.

This book is autobiographical, not fiction, and I had to keep reminding myself of that as I read. The book is peopled with strange and wonderful characters who sound as though they've been made up, but have not. I've always wondered if writers who put such eccentricity into the people who inhabit their stories have more interesting real people in their lives than the rest of us have, but I've decided that's not the case. I think it's simply that some people are more observant than others and they take more notice of the quirky, the comical and the strange that goes on around them. Writers like Monica Dickens have an appreciation for 'off-the-wallness'. I know it's not a word. Don't judge me. People with that ability can write great stories about even the most mundane things.

Personal memoirs are a favorite genre of mine and this one did not disappoint. It covers the years of Dickens' life when she lived in a boarding house and worked at a newspaper office as a rookie journalist. She has that gift of seeing the humorous in everyday things, and playing up the quirkiness of her colleagues and house-mates, she gives us a lively and amusing look at that period in her life.

I like that Dickens doesn't overwrite things. She tells a story and then gives the reader the freedom to "get it" or not. I love dry humor and wry wit; I do not like slapstick. Humor for me needs to be subtle; actually that holds true with drama and everything else as well. I would like Dan Brown's books more if there was even a hint of subtlety anywhere.

There were, I think, three different places in the book where offensive language is used. I don't enjoy that, but there were only those three and it didn't ruin the book for me. I have to say though, finding "language" was a bit disconcerting. It didn't matter how often I told myself this was Monica and not Charles, I still fell back into considering it a "Dickens" book and measuring it against that. Her English may be a bit less fastidious than his was, but she certainly does have that same ability to pour a human being onto the page that Charles had. Brilliant.

My favorite line: "The lady was in the downstairs office, pacing the linoleum in a threatening hat." This was on the opening page and once I read it I was hooked.

I've put her other books on my tbr list and look forward to reading them. I'm expecting they will be, like this one, character driven rather than plot driven. If you like that style and you haven't yet had the opportunity to try this author, you really are missing out. I can recommend "My Turn To Make The Tea" as a cleverly written and very entertaining read.

[Colin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Monica Dickens’s entertaining story of life in a provincial newspaper is a lightly fictionalised account of her own experiences working on the Herts Express in the late Forties. It’s a world that seems incredibly remote now, full of social nuances and class signifiers that have long gone, only to be replaced by new ones. It’s as interesting for its portrayal of boarding house life as it is for the light it sheds on the behind the scenes operation of a local paper. Her mercurial and dictatorial landlady, Mrs Goff, and her fellow residents wouldn’t be out of place in a Patrick Hamilton novel, and, although My Turn to Make the Tea is ostensibly a comic novel, there are enough darker moments, both at work and at home, to act as a counterbalance to the humour.

[Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an autobiographical story of Monica Dickens' experiences as a small-time reporter on a local weekly in a small English town shortly after WWII. This is not Fleet Street : the main topics are the Annual Meetings of various local organizations, the Assizes and the local "dog bites man" stories. The author struggles to find lodgings, and then becomes friends with her fellow boarders. Although the tone is gentle and ironic, the book drove home to me how hard those years were, especially for women. In the first place, it seemed to me that almost everybody was malnourished after years of food rationing. Second, sexism was rampant in a way that we can barely imagine nowadays. For instance, the title, cozy though it may seem, is a reference to the fact that, as the only "girl" in the office, the author was expected to make the tea every single day, even though, officially, there was a roster. Third, there is the story of how a (respectably married!) young woman bleeds to death after she has an illegal abortion because her landlady won't allow children and the couple can't afford any other lodgings.

The story doesn't have much structure. It is more of a day-to-day description of a couple of months in her life, which end when she loses her job because she's tampered with the newspaper proofs, removing a paragraph that could end a friend's career (the reason being that that paragraph revealed that the friend in question, a ballet dancer, was married- another anachronistic form of discrimination).

One of the weaknesses of the book was that we are presented with the narrator as fully formed, fully embedded in her newspaper job. We don't know anything about her background, her family, how she obtained her job, why she chose to take this unrewarding job etc. We don't even know her age or her appearance. All we know is that she sometimes spends a weekend in London with her family. So the main character remains a cipher, a shadowy figure. We can surmise from Monica Dickens' other books that she was a girl from a wealthy family who chose to make her own living - but nothing of that comes through in this book.

Still, overall this is an engaging book for someone who wants to spend an afternoon with a "gentle" book that is yet not sentimental.

[Kate Gardner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dickens is funny and open, delighting in revealing the details of her life as a “cub reporter”. This includes life in her rented room, and the relationships between the building’s various tenants, as well as the intricacies of a hokey local newspaper.

She makes much of how the paper’s editor discourages true reportage, and instead has them write fluff pieces and endless lists of the names of people who attended this or that function. It clearly contrasts with her own love of detail, especially salacious or unusual detail.

There are occasions when Dickens’ light chatty tone contrasts oddly with the darker side of the lives around her. While she has the escape hatch of her well-off family back in London, many of the people around her are in meaner straits. She doesn’t show pity for them, or condescend in any way, simply recounts the details like the reporter her editor won’t let her be.

- See my full review: http://www.noseinabook.co.uk/2015/10/...

[Leah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nowhere near as entertaining as her other two 'working life' books. One gets the impression she was running out of steam a little. Even her witty, bubbly style has gone flat, like champagne left out too long.

Fun enough, but ultimately forgettable, and not at all demonstrative of the heights we know she can reach.

[Nicky Reed · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this for a book group and was underwhelmed. However, very much looking forward to the discussion as several in the group have said that they have good, positive and lasting memories of reading this as their younger selves. I'm intrigued to know whether it lives up to their memories on rereading.
At its best I do think it creates a picture of an age and some humour around a woman's place in a politely-viciously gender-privileged workplace.

[Roberta · Rating 4 out of 5]

My Turn to Make the Tea è il terzo romanzo autobiografico di Monica Dickens (l'ho letto in questa raccolta). Gli altri due sono One pair of hands e One pair of feet. In questi tre volumi Monica Dickens, debuttante proveniente da una famiglia agiata ma stanca di non fare nulla, racconta le sue esperienze lavorative, prima della guerra come cuoca, durante la guerra come infermiera e successivamente, alla fine del conflitto, come giornalista.

http://robertabookshelf.blogspot.it/2...

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

A thoroughly enjoyable read of Dickens's time as a reporter at the Downingham Post. The crazy characters she works with, the crazy characters she lives with in the rooming house gives just silliness and fun, although I felt the ending came way too fast.

A big thank you to Jennifer E. for sending me this from merry ole England, I doubt I'd be able to find this in the States!

[Patricia · Rating 2 out of 5]

An easy read--took on holiday--nothing special happened in it for me!!

[Lynnie]

DNF at page 62

[Bonnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

more like 3.5 stars

[Meg Rushton · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was fun, but maybe not something I'd read again.

[Fiona · Rating 4 out of 5]

Busy and entertaining. Lots of bits and pieces f ordinary life at the time in small town UK. Interesting to thing how much experience writers got back then writing feverishly for their local paper.

[Ludovica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Non si può non tifare per Monica. Ragazza intelligente, inquieta e lavoratrice. In quanto nuova arrivata in un gruppo ben consolidato, i colleghi e il direttore le fanno la guerra a colpi di “chi ti credi di essere” e sguardi paternalistici. La solita vecchia storia insomma.

Ma Monica, piuttosto che dargli la soddisfazione di andare via, preferisce essere un’ostinata spina nel fianco e così li rimbecca a colpi di battute e va avanti per la sua strada. Il risultato è che quegli uomini burberi lasciano sempre più intravedere di che pasta sono fatti.

Uomini che, nel rivolgersi a lei oscillando tra commenti verbalmente violenti e momenti d’imbarazzato apprezzamento, danno tutta l’idea di essere semplicemente incapaci di rapportarsi a una donna. La sua penna arguta e attenta ne fa un ritratto ironico e impietoso.

Ho amato il carattere di Monica e la sua voce sicura e senza fronzoli, di donna pratica e con le spalle già larghe. I commenti dei colleghi non la scalfiscono minimamente né la fanno desistere dalle sue ambizioni.

[Jo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for the virago Facebook group. Very of its time i.e. 1951. I read this at school and loved it then. Reading it now I was struck by how to depressed and sordid life in England was in those days. Sad and terrible things happen to the residents of her boarding house. Life as a female reporter was very hard with rampant sexism. The humour hasn’t really endured, but it was very readable and I think some of the age 80+ people in one of my book groups would love this.

A couple of people in the virago fb group liked this. One said it reminded her of time working at a newspaper and another thought its themes were ‘timeless’ and that the author resembled Sophie Kinsella. I’ve never read this author so couldn’t comment but did ask for a recommendation. I’ve recently seen an amdram production of ‘the Winslow Boy’ where the female journalist was portrayed as stupid and only after a fluffy female pov for her readers. This was set two years pre WW1 but resonated with this novel.

[Kate · Rating 2 out of 5]

"As a cook-general Monica Dickens irreverently recounted how other people's crockery came to pieces in One Pair of Hands, and as a nurse how the hospital wards thundered under One Pair of Feet. In My Turn to Make the Tea she rounds off the record with an account of those glorious months when she helped, as a cub reporter, to put the Downingham Post to bed each week."
~~back cover

As a humourist, Monica Dickens falls short of P.G. Wodehouse. Imho, she's an adequate writer but not a great one, and her account of "those glorious months" seemed somewhat pedestrian, and left me wondering what the point of it all was. Her fellow reporters weren't unique enough to be funny, and the whole process seemed somewhat of an exercise in Why?

[Fern · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this many, many years ago as a teenager and remembered enjoying it but it doesn't seem to have stood the test of time and I rushed through parts of it this time around, it just seemed like a shallow, pretty uninteresting diary of a small town newspaper junior reporter where nothing much happened! Didn't even make me feel nostalgic for a time long gone. This was an old book club book I'd hung on to from my childhood home but it's off to the Charity Shop now!

[Donna Jo Atwood · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little slice of 1950's English newspaper work --local style. This is not slick, up-to-date breaking news stuff, but the day to day council meetings, teas, and run of the mill make-sure-the-name-is-spelled right local weekly paper. It reminded me of working on my college newspaper. The deadlines, the proofreading, writing headlines for the same old events.

[Donna-Louise · Rating 3 out of 5]

Being a female reporter for a regional daily, I absolutely adored this book! I had to mark it down to three stars though because there is barely a storyline and the ending is rather frustrating. Really worth a read and it should put a smile on your face

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enjoyed this 'memoir' of Dickens time as a junior reporter in a small English town. Hilarious stories and the character sketches masterful. Her descriptions ('was an old lady in top heavy hats and fur round the hem of her coats') were deft and usually funny. quite enjoyed this book!

[Alexis Lloyd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great stories from the wonderful Monica Dickens. Very amusing and heart-warming. Although somewhat dated now, these are gentle and uplifting books.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the third book in Monica Dickens’ series of fictionalised memoirs that recalls her actual experiences in various jobs. Coming from the Dickens dynasty, her background involved a good school, “finishing” in France and a return to be a debutante. Bored of the whole system, her experiences as a sort of cook and servant led to her first book, “One Pair of Hands” published in 1939. The second, which I have read and enjoyed, “One Pair of Feet”, related a version of her experiences of training as a wartime nurse. This book relates to her time as a junior reporter on a regional newspaper, as well as her time in a boarding house where her fellow tenants and landlady are sharply observed. Despite one or two tragic events, this is a novel which exhibits the humour amid the reality of working as a woman in an established but small newspaper, and the housing shortage which made for interesting times in the late 1940s. This edition is a reprint of the 1951 book and represents a fascinating look of the limitations of being a woman in a job in a fixed hierarchy, and living in a very mixed house. It is undoubtedly funny, yet also provides an insight into the hopelessness of a world still coming to terms with a difficult peace.
The great thing about the “Downingham Post” is that every week every page must be filled with local news , however trivial, repetitive, and even reworded from reports in neighbouring local papers. As the newest and only female reporter in the building, Monica has to do the boring and mundane jobs associated with the actual production of the paper, from filling inkwells to always making the tea for everyone. The only responsibilities she is entrusted with are the jobs no one else wants or can be bothered with: the wedding reports which she lovingly crafts from details proudly supplied which are reduced to the same as every other wedding report, brief reports from the local magistrates courts of minor crimes when everyone else has sloped off, and reports of gymkhanas featuring the same assembly of spoilt children and their ponies. This is far from Fleet Street but it is a paper taken by everyone, and unfortunate errors which feature in the early pages of the book are fiercely disputed. Not that the men in the office help, advise or reassure; when she returns to the office after a difficult (but funny) session with an irate reader, she records “Someone had drunk my tea, and the office cat had got my biscuit on the floor”. Monica’s voice in this book is honest, sharp and incisive in many ways, with a skilful turn of phrase and telling details. Apart from her difficulties of being the put upon junior in the office, she travels by bus (many wet bus stops) and being away from her family home, must find accommodation in a town where rooms are in short supply. She must brace herself to live in a faded room in the house of the hateful Mrs Goff, whose concern for her tenants is minimal if not cruel, and she is nervous of sleeping in a supposedly notorious room. She is not a highly trained journalist – faced with a road incident she says “I scribbled away in my homemade code substitute for shorthand, which sometimes made sense to me when I came to transcribe it and sometimes not”. Between acrobatic friends and sorting out the local sports results for the newspapers, Monica lives a full life if like everyone else still hampered by rationing and shortages.
This is a absorbing read of a young woman’s experiences which although fictionalised, have the bite of reality in all its silliness and human interest. I found the writing so easy to engage with, where there are few complaints but a winning acceptance of the trials thrown at the writer. There are the minor incidents associated with a local newspaper, but also the problems that are not deemed suitable for the loyal readership and their expectations. I recommend this book as written without the complex plot of novels, but with the daily realism of life for a young woman in a small town.

[Patrick Powell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Monica Dickens's book suffers from being neither fish nor fowl, neither ‘a novel’ nor ‘a memoir’. In fact it is difficult to understand quite what it is and, hence, why she wrote it. Certainly, writing the book and recalling her days as a junior reporter on a small provincial newspaper will have given her a great deal of pleasure, and I’m sure she enjoyed doing so. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we, the reader, gain just as much pleasure.

If Dickens intended it to be a novel, My Turn To Make The Tea is - this might sound harsh, but it has to be said - far, far too amorphous: where’s ‘the story’, what is ‘the plot’, what are ‘its themes’? The book meanders far too much here and there, and for a novel there would be far, far too much of what simply has no place in it.

So was Dickens writing a memoir? In that case, much of the detail is justified and often entertaining, but as a memoir it is simply far too long as well as too disjointed. Almost any part of her account as memoir could be taken and presented as a 1,000 feature - it might even make a series, highlighting different aspects of the job and her working life. But in such a book a great deal of it - that which constitutes the ‘novel’ elements would again simply have no place. And if she did intend to writer a memoir, why fictionalise most of it, even though I’m sure here characters are straightforward portrayals of people she encountered?

On the plus side Dickens has an easy style and can certainly write well and clearly, and she often has a neat turn of phrase, but overall that simply cannot compensate for what I regard as its, almost fatal, weakness, its lack of a definite identity. Possibly, given that it was first published in 1951, one should take into account that the world and reading public of almost 70 years ago simply wanted a different kind of book. Who knows?

I, too worked on small papers like Dickens, although almost 25 years after she did (so by then we did have typewriters) and the division of labour was different. We reporters didn't have to read proofs and or news and feature copy was subbed by a sub-editor and the editor.

Yet a great deal of Dickens’ account rings true: the parish council meetings, making sure you did not miss the last bus to get back in from the sticks, reporting the results of garden festivals, writing up accounts of weddings whose details were supplied on forms, golden weddings (‘what’s the secret of a happy marriage?’, ‘give and take’ - if I had a pound for every time I was told that and used the quote in a story), attending annual dinners, court reporting, council reporting, the fact that because we were working on a weekly paper most, if not all of, our work was often mundane to the nth degree - but then that was what the readers wanted, as the book’s editor says: they don’t want change, they want the cosily familiar.

I did move on - to an evening, then a morning paper, and I spent the last 28 years of my 'career' working on what were once known as 'Fleet Street' newspapers, though none has been based in Fleet Street for many years, and for the past decade the internet (which allows me to write and have published globally my views of the book) is killing off newspapers in double-click time - circulations are plummeting.

Ordinarily I would give Dickens’s book two stars, but she gets three because she does have a gift for writing and her lively, often a little satirical style does entertain. But the book does suffer: what is it, a novel or a memoir. In fact, it is neither.

[Phil · Rating 3 out of 5]

A semi-autobiographical novel of a young woman's job as a trainee journalist for a local paper. Although fictional, it casts some light on what it was really like for a woman trying to earn a living in a male dominated environment, where being female meant it was always 'my turn to make the tea'.

While the language, attitudes and humour have not aged well, there are still some funny moments. However, I think the chief weakness is that the narrator is very much 'playing' at being a reporter, since it's obvious she is from a moneyed background and can easily return to her family home and a life of leisure if things don't work out. This does give a certain amount of justification to the male staff for not treating 'Poppy' as a genuine member of the team (even though one suspects their attitude would have been the same, regardless of how much she needed the job). It also means that moments of jeopardy, such as when she is threatened with the loss of her job or her lodgings, don't really have much impact, since you know she can just run home. I found the most interesting parts of the book were the ones that dealt with the various residents of the boarding house Poppy stays in, such as the couple who are faced with homelessness when the wife falls pregnant, because landladies could refuse to house someone who had a child, or the young girl who has to keep her marriage secret or lose her job. Anyone who wants to return to the 'good old days' should perhaps read this novel to be reminded that they really weren't that good at all, especially for the poor.

[Vansa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had never even heard of Monica DIckens, till I read this delightful, witty, semi-autobiographical novel, of a young woman trying to earn a living just after World War II. Poppy wants to be an intrepid reporter, breaking news stories of great import, but she's the junior most report at a local paper called the Downingham Post, and the most responsibility her editor seems to give her is making tea for all of them-even when it's not her turn! She takes lodgings at Mrs.GOff's boarding-house and there's an interesting cast of characters-her acrobat friend Maimie, Myra Nelson, a ballet dancer who's secretly married but can't tell the head of her ballet corps, Margaret, and are those possibly Communists or Anarchists in the basement? Monica Dickens is very funny, but also sharply insightful about the difficulties of trying to make it in a country trying to get back to its feet after a devastating war-she's very matter-of-fact about all these people seeking lodgings because there's a housing shortage in England on account of all the bombings during the BLitz, and have to put up with all Mrs.Goff's idiosyncracies-one of them leading to a tragedy in the boarding house that's particularly affecting. The book strikes a perfect balance between the pratfalls and poignancy of the time, and I want to be a Monica DIckens completist after this! Perfect for fans of AJ Pearce, it's sad authors like this have been mostly forgotten.