She is on friendly terms with the neighbours but, most importantly, she makes a dear friend of Sir Philip, her landlord and an old school friend of her uncle’s. She is a practical young woman: what does it matter what the villagers think as she is only going to be there for four years?īut, inevitably as the years pass, Lesley finds herself being absorbed by country life. It’s important to clarify the truth to a few people – the vicar and his wife, for instance, not because Lesley has taken up religion in any way but because they have four young children for Pat to play with which nicely occupies the bulk of his day – but after that Lesley couldn’t care less. She after all has all the markings of a frivolous, moral-less young thing likely to get herself into such a situation and then brazen it out. In the country, not surprisingly, everyone immediately assumes Pat is Lesley’s child. There were the suburbs, of course, through which one occasionally passed in a car, and where people out of Punch borrowed each other’s mowers but as for living there – Lesley listened incredulously: it was as though they advised her to try Australia.
The suburbs, when suggested to her by estate agents, are completely out of the question: It begins with a move to the country after having discovered she can’t afford anything suitable in town. In doing so, she realises she will have to leave her beloved London flat (no children allowed) and, at least for the next four years until he can be sent to boarding school, completely upend her well-ordered life.
And if that is the case, she begins to wonder, what is the point of the whirlwind social life among artists and other bright young things, and the obsession with powdering, plucking, and painting herself into a modern beauty?Īnd so, in search of a purpose, she decides to adopt an orphaned four-year old boy (Pat) whom her aunt has unexpectedly been left in charge with. Yes, they flirt with her and try to get her into bed but when she meets a man she’d actually like to fall in love with – nothing. Published in 1933 (but recently reissued), the book begins several years earlier as twenty-nine-year old Lesley comes to a startling realisation after a dud of a date: she is not a woman that men fall in love with. What is this delightful, joyful, life-changing (at least in my attitude towards its author) book you may ask? The Flowering Thorn by Margery Sharp. I have a new book on my list of favourites and, much to my surprise, it’s by an author whose writing I had previously described as “ a long-winded mess” and “ a chore to work through to the finish”.
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