Goodbye Piccadilly

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles Book 1 in the War at Home series.

First published 2014

Amazon

2.5(5)

In 1914, the Hunter family and the servants of Artemis House watch a distant European crisis become a war that reshapes every part of their lives. David Hunter sees enlistment as a chance to prove himself, while his mother Beattie fears what military service may cost. Diana hopes for marriage across a class divide, and below stairs the household follows invasion rumours, casualty lists and the arrival of soldiers with growing anxiety.

The first War at Home novel moves between domestic life and the opening months of the First World War. Belgian refugees, requisitions, volunteering and wounded men bring the conflict directly into the village, while old assumptions about class, gender and duty begin to weaken. Harrod-Eagles uses one family and its servants to show how quickly the routines of Edwardian England were overtaken by mobilisation and uncertainty.