The 21 stories in Good Evening, Mrs Craven portray the lives of people on the Home Front, getting on with their lives set against the backdrop of war. They’re not stories of action but their subjects are psychological, emotional and social. They offer a glimpse into what life was like then - the mood, the atmosphere, the tension and the fear, the hopes and the devastation, the loss and the loneliness, the stress and the tragi-comedy of life.

Mollie Panter-Downes’s style is fluent, a touch journalistic, sometimes subtly ironic and most pleasurable to read. There are stories of housewives, evacuees, billeted soldiers and Home Front volunteers, of the ladies in the Red Cross sewing party who met ‘twice a week to stitch pyjamas, drink a dish of tea, and talk about their menfolk’, the effects of food rationing, of lovers separated by the war and of ‘The Woman Alone’.

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Delightful collection of short stories, very New Yorker, very English, but sings with Mollie Panter-Downes' uniquely clever and gentle voice. All are charged with wry humor and an undercurrent of loneliness, populated by characters on the home front and their various ways of dealing with war, connecting with others in uncertain circumstances, and simply, as one must, getting on with life. ( )

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These short stories first appeared in The New Yorker between 1939 and 1944. Each story is a snapshot of people (particularly women) at a defining point in their lives, viewed against the backdrop of the War, which of course affected the lives of everyone, not just those 'in action'. Each story is brief and to the point, without any kind of extraneous detail or sub-plot. There is nothing difficult about them (she eschews the 'stream of consciousness' style of writing), but taken as a whole they give a very real and moving picture of women's lives during this period.

The Mrs Craven of the title story is not actually Mrs Craven at all - she is the mistress of Mr Craven, who meets her in a restaurant where the waiter has assumed they are husband and wife. Mr Craven expects her to be calm, having made it clear that he has no intention of leaving his wife and children for her. She does her best to be the kind of mistress he requires, but the pose is shattered as she worries who will let her know if something happens to him when he's on active service.

We are shown the relief (and guilt) of women disburdened of the evacuee families foisted upon them, and the new pressures upon middle-class women having to manage their homes without servants. Although the war is ever present in each story, the emotions dealt with are timeless: the loneliness of a single woman who wishes she could make friends with her neighbours; the man living an uneventful life with his sister who hopes the war will bring some meaning to his life.

Whilst there's nothing at all fancy about these stories, each one is deeply satisfying and, in its own way, quite perfect. [Jan 2006] ( )