Pamela's Spring Song

[from "Let's Talk aBout Books" column by Franziska in "The Australian Woman's Mirror", October 1, 1929] Pamela is a London typist who, having inherited £100, goes for a holiday to the Tyrol and put up at a guest-house which is conducted by the people of a young count who lost their fortune through the war. In idyllic surroundings, she and the young man fall in love; and, her money spent, she is taking the train that will lead back to London when he realises the full power of her charms. The owners of an opposition guest-house who try to boycott their ex-aristocratic competitors are used to eke out the story. The chief merit of the novel is the setting and the romantic flow of the love tale.

I expected this book to sparkle and fizz -- "Romance, keeping us on tip-toe" -- but there's a real air of melancholy that runs through it. This is the first Cecil Roberts I've read and he certainly doesn't sugarcoat the cost of war, in this case WWI, and its ravaged aftermath. Both main characters are in their mid-20's and have spent the better part of the past decade piecing together their lives after suffering profound loss -- socioeconomic and familial. It's a romance, so there's an HEA to look forward to, but it was published in 1929 and for the modern reader, the hopefulness of the closing pages can't help but be shadowed by our knowledge of the decade to come: the Depression, the Anschluss, and, again, the devastation of war.

The story itself isn't anything special -- a typical "one wonderful day/month/year" for our plucky little secretary Pamela, summed up in a couple of sentences about halfway through: "Less than a month ago she sat with the typists of Truslove and Trimmer, drinking tea on the third floor of Oldbury Buildings, Aldgate. Now, sitting between an Austrian count and an English peer's son, she drank tea with Tyrolean peasants and listened to the village minstrel!" The drama, as the description/review above suggests, is pretty forced, but there're some nice bits of travelogue around late-20s Tyrol (Salzburg, Kufstein, etc.) and a pleasing friendship between two older, single female characters -- guests at the hotel. One of them is, actually, kind of the emotional core of the story and the real "heroine", if there is one. In another brief instance, a same-sex romantic relationship is strongly, sympathetically, and movingly implied (the author, himself, was gay).

Flags: Some ethnic insensitivity in description of a side character's Italian "secretary"/paid lover.