the gulls fly inland

It is October 1939. Blanche Lancret is a French exile in England,
looking after her American friend Annabelle’s baby. She is
waiting for news of Annabelle’s brother Vernon, who is serving with an ambulance unit in newly-invaded France, and of her surrogate mother Tante
Julie, a rich démimondaine nursing her dying husband Otto on
the French Riviera.

To maintain her sang-froid Blanche
writes her journal, recalling
how she met Vernon as a schoolgirl, her girlhood with Tante Julie in Paris and with her father in Italy, and
her inexplicable betrayal by Tante Julie’s servants, who ensure that
Blanche and Vernon fail
to meet at a crucial point in their
courtship.
Vernon then
marries the
impervious
Bostonian Leonora and Blanche believes him to be lost to her
forever.
Until
Vernon realises that Blanche is about to sail back to Europe and appears in her
stateroom asking her to stay ... As the years wind forward Blanche and
Vernon remain
separated by other
people’s
machinations, and only the war might set them free.

Sylvia Thompson’s glorious, passionate
novel of the 1930s and the early years of the Second World War is a sumptuous
romance set in the imperturbable correctness of interwar Paris, and in fast-moving 1930s London
and Boston. Thompson’s
storytelling
is devastating
in
its emotional truth. This
is a
wonderful
forgotten novel from 1941, now reissued with an introduction by Faye Hammill,
Professor of English at the University of Glasgow.

Beautiful and wayward, Sylvia Thompson (1903-68) was an Oxford contemporary of Dorothy L Sayers and Vera Brittain, and published 14 novels from 1926. She married the artist Theodore ’Peter’ Luling and lived in Surrey. She had three daughters, largely brought up by her own mother.