Harvest Home

'Well, I see it like this,' returned Priscilla with great animation. 'He needs help in saving his harvest. Well, the answer is-make a jolly Harvest Camp. Let’s all get together, go down and camp in the park or the stables or any old place. I’ll do the arranging. A mixed party, of course-’Come lasses and lads,’ style-’Olde Englysshe’ atmosphere-ye olde hay-wain-sun-bonnets?'Who could foresee the aftershocks of cheerful young Lucinda ('Cinders') Bradsole’s jaunt to London to visit her sister Angela? Her parents, Sir Giles and Lady Bradsole, are struggling to keep their farm afloat amid austere postwar conditions, and are now facing a desperate labour shortage (what with no more soldiers or prisoners of war about to lend a hand). But Angela’s roommate Priscilla, who fancies herself a psychoanalyst, sees their crisis as an opportunity for festive rustic frolics and intensive observation of human nature. She invites her current 'project', a modern poet named Aylwin Vines ('quite incomprehensible but frightfully clever') and their handsome Canadian neighbour Simon Kingsford, who has secret reasons of his own for a rural sojourn. And before he knows it, Sir Giles has far more help (and in quite different form) than he could ever have bargained for.Harvest Home, first published in 1950, is a rollicking romantic comedy in Dorothy Lambert’s inimitable style.This new edition features a new introduction by twentieth-century women’s historian Elizabeth Crawford.'Bubbling with fun' Punch