Pink Sugar by O. Douglas
Kirsty Gilmour ("I'm 30 but you shouldn't make me say it out loud,") makes a home for herself in the Scottish Borders and takes under her wing a gentle old aunt and three motherless children; Barbara, Specky and Bad Bill. Originally written in the 1920s,'Pink Sugar' is full of perfectly drawn characters with old-fashioned values from a vanished world; a world of kindness and good manners, of generosity and self-restraint, and yet a world where poverty, illness and bereavement are just below the surface. In this society of women with peripheral men, social life centres round afternoon tea - we could be in Cranford-on-Tweed. This edition includes a Foreword by Lady Stewartby, the author's great-niece and Bad Bill's daughter, and an introduction to the Peeblesshire locations where Anna Buchan was so very much at home.