The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club by Helen Simonson

In the lobby of the respectable Meredith Hotel in the seaside village of Hazelbourne, two English ladies from different backgrounds face a dilemma that results from being female.

Vastly different in character, attitude and station, they seem to have little in common. A penniless lady’s companion to Mrs. Fog, Constance is used to social snubs. When, Klaus, the German waiter, is obliged to tell her ladies cannot be seated in the Grand Dining Room alone, she maintains a quiet dignity.

When Poppy enters the lobby clad in pants and boots, she not only tries to persuade Klaus to bend the rules for her, but fails “to look as humiliated as the situation seems to require.” Though it embarrasses him to do so, Klaus must preserve his own status, reputation and job by insisting that the hotel only serves tea on the Palm Terrace, where “afternoon attire is required.”

The solution is simple. Constance lends a skirt to her new acquaintance and they have tea together. Even as Poppy openly admits to being “unchaperonable,” the two women embark on a friendly alliance that will change both their lives.

The hard currency of this stratified society is pedigree and money, which cushions those fortunate enough to possess them from the kinds of suffering other classes must endure. Constance is unimpressed by the self-pity of Poppy’s brother Harris, who lost a leg flying for the RAF.

Realizing from her response how his witty teasing has stung Constance makes Harris aware of the buffer provided by him by class and money. In a moment of self-assessment, he sees that “‘Sheltered in the old boys’ bonhomie of the Flying Corps, he had been slow to realize how much more character was worth than pedigree.” Later, he matures further, noticing how “each person saw their own circumstances loom large, as if through a telescope, and the tribulations of others as if backwards, through the small end.”

The other characters in the book leap off the page with equal aplomb. The elderly Mrs. Fog, Constance’s employer, is of the old school. With only a hazy notion of the Ladies Motorcycle School, she finds it hard to imagine that a lady who had been a librarian could repair motorcycles without smudging the books with oil, she has acquired enough wisdom to observed how “older people conveniently did not remember having suffered any errors of judgment and lectured from an invincible high moral podium,” making one wonder “how wars had ever begun…given the impeccable record of wise decisions by all those over thirty.”

Jock, the aircraft mechanic, has been emotionally battered by a dreadful wartime bereavement. Yet he finds himself excited by the prospect of patching up a damaged airplane. Wisely, he observes to Harris, his fellow-veteran, “‘You’d think after all we’ve seen that never would be too soon to see another airplane, but it doesn’t work that way, does it?’…This one’s a real wounded comrade…”

Iris, another member of the Ladies Motorcycle Club, is cynical, ironic and straight talking. As they discuss the upcoming parade, she comments that “the newspapers don’t like to spoil the victory with a fully display of the cost,” adding that with over 2 million dead and over 40,000 amputees, it sometimes seems “as if the dead are more convenient than the wounded.”

Even the snobbish and interfering Lady Mercer, seen through the compassionate eyes of Constance, has something to teach us. Privilege has its price, and “even the most difficult people may suffer underneath their armour.”

On the beach lies a U-boat left over from the war, “as sad as an old beached whale.” When the navy tries to break it up, Constance wonders “why they were in such a rush to have the war…tidied away,” and reflects that “perhaps a lasting peace required some rusting reminders of carnage.”

For the Victory Parade, the townspeople go all out to dress up until “the lobby resembled an epic medieval tapestry.” As it turns out, the smell of pomp is akin to that of mothballs. Soon things go terribly wrong.

Indeed, reading the last few pages, as problem piled on problem, I wondered how the writer could possibly extricate her characters and provide the hopeful ending I knew would come. This was the best kind of book, in which the surprises keep coming until the very end.