As Tremain recalls at her age of 28: "Angus Wilson wrote a generous front-cover puff, and the novel was widely noticed and quietly praised...A refreshing little shower of success was suddenly falling on me".

[1] Jack Sadler is 76 years old lives alone in a big neglected house in Norfolk, his only companion being a nameless dog.

During the war an eleven-year boy called Tom was evacuated from London to live for five years at the house where Jack took him under his wing, where their relationship developed into love.

Colonel and Madge were killed on their way to the Queen's coronation that morning in London; Jack was then left the house and their inheritance... Joyce Carol Oates writing in The New York Times praises the novel "a rather special work, a simple novel that dwells lovingly upon the details of simple lives without condescension or bitterness.

There are times when seems that the ideal English novel is an artifact of a certain number of cautious, well‐crafted pages that manage to offend no one, while stressing the oldest and most conservative of virtues‐stability, acceptance, stoicism, a sort of wry self‐deprecatory humour that translates into courage.