Tamsin Yelland lives an idyllic life on her grandfather’s market garden until he dies and her mother remarries the sanctimonious preacher Arthur Hillbright.  They move to the Hampshire town of Brackleford where Arthur takes up his ministry and this is where Tamsin first meets the suffragette Lucinda Murrary and her son Alexander.  Tamsin has no wish to go with her parents to Africa when her stepfather is offered a missonary post so she has to look for local work, difficult for a young girl just before the First World War.  She finds it as private secretary to a local writer and her again she meets up with Alexander who is deeply involved with aeronautics.  Soon the war breaks out and Alex has to go away…. 

This is a saga but not a particularly clog and shawl one for a change.  Tamsin battles to get her own way and wants it all – marriage, children and a job in aeronautics – and this is the story of how she manages it. As with many other sagas it is the domestic details and the romance, which constitute at least 85% of the novel but personally I think that the book could have done with a larger dose of the heady excitement that must have been a major part of early aviation.  I don’t mean the nuts and bolts of it as this is not a textbook but what it felt like to have been there watching history unfold.  If you like sagas this one is an entertaining tale but for me that essential feeling of the period seemed to be somewhat lacking.  We are told about suffragettes, the war, aviation etc and I wanted to be shown them.