Review of The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club by Helen Simonson

 

Constance Haverhill is a wonderful main character—intelligent, loving, giving, perceptive, ambitious, gracious, and funny in turn. She has spent the First World War running her family’s farm in the absence of her brother. Out of a job when he comes home safely, she has taken a temporary position as a companion to an elderly family friend who is convalescing at an English seaside hotel after a bout with the Spanish flu. Her future seems to be as a governess or a bookkeeper—both bleak and not prime avenues to marriage. 

 Then she meets Poppy, a woman from the monied class, who had carried dispatches on a motorcycle during the war. She has marshalled a group of local single women who were also riders and formed a taxi service to carry people around the town in the sidecars of their cycles. Poppy’s brother, a fighter pilot, has returned from the front without a leg and is having major PTSD issues.

There you have it. A historical event populated by young marriageable women of all classes who have done work in formerly male occupations during a war and are now seeing their hard-won freedoms being ripped away.  Poppy launches another plan for her incapacitated brother to teach women to fly, and there you have the full and catchy title.  

Various characters are there to display the disparity between the British upper and lower classes. The contrast is eloquently covered. The women, whether spunky or pompous, are hard to see as motorcycle demons and potential pilots but they carry the story through multiple twists, and romances. Everything builds to an exciting climax in the air and on the matrimony field. The whole ambiance seems spot on. The richness and endearing qualities of her characters and the luscious beauty of her descriptions of the seaside and the countryside will capture you, I’m sure. 

I will close with a few of the sentences I marked to illustrate Simonson’s prose chops.  

An image--“Percival turned an alarming shade of purple, strangled somewhere between his scorn and his public politeness.”

A smell-- “Ah, next to fresh-baked bread, there’s nothing better than the smell of petrol in the morning.”

A view on marriage before and after the war--“One had to dance with a lot of frogs to find the rare prince. But now the tide has really gone out.”

A view on life in general as noted by our heroine--“To live for today, one must be reasonably financially assured of tomorrow.”

I give this book a fine 4.5 out of 5. Truly enjoyable read.