The Girls at His Billet

[from dust jacket flap] A clever, humorous, captivating love story, these words express inadequately this sparkling novel by Berta Ruck.

Three really pretty sisters, blue-eyed and golden-haired, live a healthy and rather sleepy life in one of the most quiet and remote villages in England, where they are far removed from young and attractive men.

The war changes things, and from dwelling in a manless desert, they find themselves in an oasis that fairly teems with young masculinity when hundreds of troops are quartered in their neighborhood.

One dapper young officer is even billeted in their own home. Then not only one love affair follows, but three -- mirth-provoking but full of charm. After surprise and counter-surprise, which leads one from page to page with ever-growing interest, each of the three love affairs winds up in an unexpected and delightful way.

Berta Ruck is a genius in picturing young girls, as her stories have well proved; but in "The Girls at His Billet" she has outdone herself. You will enjoy the story.

This is the first Berta Ruck I'm entering but she's my #1 comfort-read author and I've amassed a small mountain of her titles, so expect more soon. The Girls at His Billet is one of her earliest books and it's a lot of fun. It's narrated, first-person, by eighteen-year-old Elizabeth, youngest of the three orphaned sisters referenced above. The narrative form is hard to classify: she writes events as they happen, almost journal-like, but occasionally addresses her reader -- "you" -- directly. Interspersed with this are excerpts from the male MCs journal and letters written between him and her. Which sounds like kind of a hodge-podge, but it works. Elizabeth is a delightfully semi-reliable narrator. She's young, and acts it, but she's got a generous heart and a generally sound head on her shoulders, and Ruck does a good job keeping her sympathetic even when she's not behaving exactly well. Ruck had sons -- she wrote to put them through school -- so her young male characters feel more authentic than many writers', too. And their slang is SO great. Jolly ripping. Top-hole.

One of the things I love about Ruck is the way she plays with gender norms and expectations and, in Girls, that's on full display. Primary example: Elizabeth and her sisters are "Junoesque", "miles bigger than stock size" -- nearly 6 feet tall (in 1916) -- "a family of giantesses" with big feet and "nice plump" arms. The male MC, for his part, is a slim 5' 6" and his work (provisioning) is not the more overtly masculine soldiering of the other men in the camp (munitions and engineering). While she "hates" him, Elizabeth returns frequently and derisively (despite her sisters' chiding) to his "miniature" size and "housekeeping" occupation, but as her attraction grows, the first becomes a non-issue and she grows to respect the latter. He might "glare back up at her" on foot, and seem very small and boyish in his hospital bed, but these are just facts she relates, with no implications for his manliness or appeal as a romantic partner. I can't emphasize enough how rare this is in vintage (and maybe contemporary?) light romantic fiction, especially when the people involved are ordinary young men and women and not the unusual characters you find in, say, Louise Gerard.

The spy plot is exceedingly mild, and the war's addressed with a very light hand, but the book's as cozy and comforting as the girls' "lair" and, sometimes, that's a fine & needed thing. Very fast read. I recommend.

(I'll post the list of Berta's titles I'm missing elsewhere -- if you have one to spare, I'd love to chat!)