The Gulls Fly Inland

It is October 1939. Blanche Lancret is a French exile in England, looking after her American friend Annabelle’s baby. She is waiting for news of Annabelle’s brother Vernon, who is serving with an ambulance unit in newly-invaded France, and of her surrogate mother Tante Julie, a rich démimondaine nursing her dying husband Otto on the French Riviera.

To maintain her sang-froid Blanche writes her journal, recalling how she met Vernon as a schoolgirl, her girlhood with Tante Julie in Paris and with her father in Italy, and her inexplicable betrayal by Tante Julie’s servants, who ensure that Blanche and Vernon fail to meet at a crucial point in their courtship. Vernon then marries the impervious Bostonian Leonora and Blanche believes him to be lost to her forever. Until Vernon realises that Blanche is about to sail back to Europe and appears in her stateroom asking her to stay … As the years wind forward Blanche and Vernon remain separated by other people’s machinations, and only the war might set them free.

Sylvia Thompson’s glorious, passionate novel of the 1930s and the early years of the Second World War is a sumptuous romance set in the imperturbable correctness of interwar Paris, and in fast-moving 1930s London and Boston. Thompson’s storytelling is devastating in its emotional truth. This is a wonderful forgotten novel from 1941, now reissued with an introduction by Faye Hammill, Professor of English at the University of Glasgow.