Roy Southgate and Reginald Conynghame-Jervis have nothing in common but
their loneliness and their wartime memories. Roy, a retired milkman and
Reggie, a former RAF Squadron Leader, are widowed on the same day. To
assuage their grief, the vicar arranges for Roy to move in with Reggie
as his unpaid manservant. To their surprise, they form a strange
alliance, based on obedience, need and the strangeness of single life.
Then Reggie meets Liz, a vibrant but near-bankrupt woman of irresistible
appeal, while Roy and his son's family grow gradually closer. Marriage,
it seems, however far from ideal, can be a great protector against
isolation.
Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969) grew up in Hove and London. She was
encouraged by her father, who sadly died from a sudden heart attack when
she was sixteen, to read Classics from a young age. She attended
Holloway College in London to study Classics and wrote her first novel
Delores in 1911. Compton-Burnett suffered several losses after her
father--her closest brother died three years later, three more of her
younger siblings and her mother passed away by the time she was 35,
something she rarely spoke about, but constantly visited in her novels.
Compton-Burnett published twenty novels. However, the first of her works
to use her mature and original style was published when she was forty,
in 1925. Compton-Burnett's fiction is often said to be Edwardian in
setting--the domestic occurrences in large households. She never married
and lived in London as companion to Margaret Jourdain. She was named a
Dame Commander of the British Empire (DBE) in 1967.
