A London Family Between the Wars - M V Hughes

This is a gentle, often humorous account of a family growing up in the rural environs of London in the 1920s and 1930s. Though readers of Molly Hughes’s delightful autobiographical trilogy A London Child of the 1870s, A London Girl of the 1880s, and London Home in the 1890s will take up this sequel to her story with special eagerness, it can be equally enjoyed by the reader discovering Molly Hughes for the first time.

Molly Hughes is now a widow, with very little money and three sons to educate. On the strength of her teaching experience she has become a schools inspector and examiner – a job which proves a rich source for anecdote. She moves her family to Cuffley, then an unspoilt rural village 15 miles from King’s Cross. Born and bred a Londoner, she is elated to find that, incredibly, the garden of their first house affords a view of St. Paul’s. The amenities of Cuffley are few, but hold charm for the modern reader. The Times arrives by bicycle; necessities from sugar to doormats can be bought from a hawker with a pony-cart; and telephone calls are made from a local farmhouse.

The story that unfolds is an undramatic one about ordinary people. There are adventures, but of the homely kind: an evening at the ‘talkies’, the move to a new house, the excitement of the first grandchild. It is the way Molly Hughes writes of them – simply, vividly, and without sentiment – and her own irrepressible sense of fun that make this book a delight to read.