Tea and Biscuits

This mild and vaguely humorous novel reminds me of the inoffensive radio dramas that used to play regularly on our government funded National radio service during the Nineteen Fifties and Sixties. I can imagine it as an extended school composition piece about farm life for which the student would receive an "EXCELLENT" stamp from the teacher.
Farm life in mid-century New Zealand is portrayed in the guise we were all brought up to believe, that the men were laconic, hard-working, family types who didn't flinch at lending a hand to a neighbour in need. The women were similarly hard-working with additional responsibilities for managing a household that could burgeon with families and workers, remaining cheerful as the engines behind the show more social cohesion of their districts.
This story revolves around a middle-aged man who has fallen heedlessly for a pretty, headstrong young English woman, Gloria. The man's niece (an irritating character named Larry) sees the new-comer as a gold-digger and arranges rather spiteful manoeuvres to cause the affair to be doomed. Much of the antagonism arises from the arrival of the beautiful outsider, Gloria who appears to the locals as someone who will upset the assumed order of family and civic welfare.
The writer Mary Scott was successful in her time. She was not used to back-country farming, being a city girl. However, she wrote to supplement the farming income which was often in jeopardy from setbacks financial and natural and was a country librarian.
These rural novels of New Zealand were often amusing, strait-laced and presented only a surficial look at life. I am pleased to have read a novel of this kind, if only for a first-hand experience of them. show less