The first chapters cover Judith’s days as she and her mother buy school uniform, and talk about the future, and pack up their rental house, deciding what’s to go into storage. She would prefer to live with her Aunt Biddy and Uncle Bob, but they too are shortly to move and Louise has much more space. Judith is to spend her holidays with her Aunt Louise she’s quite fond of her, but doesn’t much like her house. Judith is reasonably calm about it all indeed, she has more common sense and organisational ability than her somewhat flighty mother… This is because her mother and little sister Jess are going to join Judith’s father in Colombo, and then moving to Singapore, and back in the 1930s it wasn’t considered appropriate to have British teenagers living in Asian cultures. She’s saying goodbye to her best school friend, as she is shortly to move to a boarding school. The main protagonist is Judith Dunbar, who is fourteen when the story opens. But Pilcher is such a good writer that even my least favourite of her novels is well worth re-reading. Of her four saga-length novels, it’s the one I recalled as liking the least it takes place before and during World War II and has one or two sordid as well as tragic scenes. It’s fourteen years since I last read ‘Coming Home’, a saga novel with over 1000 pages. Gradually I’m re-reading Rosamunde Pilcher’s novels, most of them for the third or fourth time.
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