Fit fior a Duchess

Fit for a Duchess, indeed was the splendid up-to-date privy which the Budd family finally achieved, after generations of living with a hut in the garden. But, as usually happens, there was a canker: the marvels of modern technology defeated them.

As with her previous books there is much splendidly remembered of life in Southern England in the 1930s. Already Mavis Budd was noticing the destruction of green and living things by chemicals, and out of this world of picnics and pinafores there emerges a topical warning. It was not only the outside privies that were disappearing.