Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson

What fun this book was. It’s written by an American so it’s clearly a romanticised version, an Americanised idea, of what a traditional British major living in a pretty English village in a house called Rose Cottage might be like. So it’s nonsense, but it’s charming nonsense.

Helen Simonson has allowed all her fantasies to run riot. The protagonist, Major Earnest Petttigrew, is almost exactly like my mother’s second husband, who would have lain down and died for the Queen and the British Empire – even though it no longer exists. The Major is pompous and correct, but of course his view is all underpinned by tough British standards of morality and tempered with a good dose of intelligence and wit.

As an established figure in the village, the Major thinks he has his life all sorted out – and he is indeed very comfortably resigned to an ordered old age (crikey he’s only 68!) and a gentle sort of contentment. But along comes a Pakistani shopkeeper, Mrs Ali, who become the love interest in the book and sets everything upside down.

We know the plot – boy meets girls, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back again – backwards, but Simonson has a lot of fun with it, even while gently introducing the problems that the mixing of cultures can present. She sticks it up the British ruling class, the deadly upper middle classes who run village committees, even the brash Americans, all with gay abandon.

This isn’t great literature but I don’t think it was ever intended to be: Simonson wrote this with her writing group after having put her career on hold to bring up the kids, so why not enjoy herself? I certainly did.