Somewhere in England de Carola Oman

Somewhere in England

Carola Oman

Roy Strong

"At any rate," ended Philippa-Dawn, staring up at the garland of silver monsters gently swaying above them in the evening sky, "at any rate, it'll be a change of Balloons." Carola Oman's irresistible sequel to Nothing to Report begins with young, perky Philippa-Dawn Johnson, preparing to launch her nursing career at Woodside, the country home now overseen as a hospital by none other than the redoubtable Mary Morrison. Pippa soon encounters other faces familiar to readers of the earlier novel, including Mrs. Bates, whose debilitating rheumatism has been suddenly cured by Hitler, the Dowager Lady Merle, who is "the living image of Elizabeth Tudor in later life", and the redoubtable historical novelist (and alter-ego of Oman herself?) Rosanna Masquerier, doing war work and encountering bombs with her usual flair. Set in the thick of World War II, Somewhere in England traces Oman's charming and eccentric village characters through unforgettable new muddles, romances, and hilarities on the Home Front. Dean Street Press and Furrowed Middlebrow have also reprinted Nothing to Report. "Delicious fun for the wise and gentle everywhere." Observer

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Carola Mary Anima Oman was born in 1897 in Oxford, the second of three children of Sir Charles and Mary Oman. In 1906 she was sent to Miss Batty's School in Park Crescent, Oxford, where she eventually became head girl. In World War One Carola Oman was a probationary VAD nurse at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford. After various nursing appointments during the war, she was discharged in 1919. Her first book, The Menin Road and Other Poems, was published later that year. On 26 April 1922, Carola Oman married Gerald Lenanton, and subsequently devoted most of her writing in the 1920s and 1930s to a series of historical novels, influenced in part by her close friend Georgette Heyer. In the course of a writing career of more than half a century Oman published over thirty books of fiction, history, and biography, among them several historical works for children, and Ayot Rectory (1965), set in the village where she and her husband had settled in a Jacobean manor, Bride Hall. In later years she specialized in historical biography. 1946 saw her prize-winning biography of Nelson, the book on which her reputation as a biographer rests. She was appointed CBE in 1957. After two strokes, Carola Oman died at Bride Hall, Ayot St Laurence, on 11 June 1978.