Cover

Susan Scarlett
Summer Pudding

There was silence. In it Janet heard the twittering of innumerable birds chatting as they settled down for the night. Some rooks cawed overhead. The baa of a sheep came from a distant field. London had been so noisy, with its crashes at night, and blastings and hammerings at smashed buildings by day, that the quiet and peace fell on her spirit like a cold hand on a sprained ankle.

Janet Brain has been bombed out of her job in a London office and comes to the village of Worsingford (surely a case of going from bad to Worsingford), where her self-absorbed sister Sheila and their mother Maggie are weathering the war. Maggie has a bad heart and should be resting, but Sheila’s too busy fancying herself a film star to help out. Close at hand are Donald, a handsome young widower, and his adorable daughter, as well as Barbara, a charming girl whose love is away on active service, and Barbara’s curmudgeonly but likeable old father, a retired colonel (not to mention the ghosts in his house). There should be happy endings for all, but Donald’s possessive young housekeeper and a series of misunderstandings precipitated by Sheila’s selfishness will have to be dealt with first.

Summer Pudding is the eighth of twelve charming, page-turning romances published under the pseudonym “Susan Scarlett” by none other than beloved children’s author and novelist Noel Streatfeild. Out of print for decades, they were rediscovered by Greyladies Books in the early 2010s, and Dean Street Press and Furrowed Middlebrow are delighted now to make all twelve available to a wider audience.

“A writer who shows a rich experience in her writing and a charm” Nottingham Journal

FM92

INTRODUCTION

When reviewing Clothes-Pegs, Susan Scarlett’s first novel, the Nottingham Journal (4 April 1939) praised the ‘clean, clear atmosphere carefully produced by a writer who shows a rich experience in her writing and a charm which should make this first effort in the realm of the novel the forerunner of other attractive works’. Other reviewers, however, appeared alert to the fact that Clothes-Pegs was not the work of a tyro novelist but one whom The Hastings & St Leonards Observer (4 February 1939) described as ‘already well-known’, while explaining that this ‘bright, clear, generous work’, was ‘her first novel of this type’. It is possible that the reviewer for this paper had some knowledge of the true identity of the author for, under her real name, Noel Streatfeild had, as the daughter of the one-time vicar of St Peter’s Church in St Leonards, featured in its pages on a number of occasions.