Mrs Rockaby was pleased . . .
“Not such a bad old thing really,” she told her husband on getting home, “and not frightening, really, once you get to know him. You know, Donald, in a way, shooting their daughters-in-law and so on, the Monsoons are rather fun.”
The “hero” of Family Ties is the eccentric, elderly Mr. Monsoon, living in comfortable squalor with his wife, two sons, and two daughters-in-law, including bored, restless Amy, whom he shoots (only wings, really, and that accidentally). The Monsoons are indeed rather fun, as are the other unusual inhabitants of the village, from Mrs. Tyce, widow of the former lord of the manor, who can “look back on a long life more than half of which she has spent being horribly bored,” to the well-meaning but ridiculous Mrs Rockaby, who hopes one day to return to a bustling life in London and look just as young and lovely as before. There’s the Monsoon gardener, who enjoys telling “little children about the Devil and idle hands,” and the pretentious Mr. Swan, current resident of the manor, who sets out to marry the Rockabys’ daughter as if it’s a task on his to do list. And of course there’s poor frustrated Amy, who wants to be herself as well as a wife and mother.
Furrowed Middlebrow and Dean Street Press are proud to make available for the first time since the 1950s the underrated fiction of Celia Buckmaster, combining incomparable characters and a sharp, biting wit.
Celia Buckmaster was born on 28 November 1914, and her youth was spent in London and Buckinghamshire. In September 1937 she married Robert Gibson-Fleming, but they divorced two years later. Around this time Celia Buckmaster moved in the London literary circles centring on Dylan Thomas, publishing work in progressive literary magazines. She was also close to poet Lynette Roberts, with whom she worked as a professional flower arranger. In late 1939 Celia Buckmaster travelled to Burma and married Edmund Leach there in February 1940. In 1942, after the Japanese invasion of Burma, Celia returned to England with her new-born baby Loulou, and bought a house in the Hertfordshire village of Holwell. Celia and Edmund later had a son, Alexander, in 1946. The family moved to Cambridge in 1953 where Edmund Leach was a university lecturer. At Holwell Celia wrote her only two published novels, Village Story (1951) and Family Ties (1952). Edmund Leach was knighted in 1975 and after his retirement the couple lived at Barrington, outside Cambridge. Lady Celia Leach died in 2005.
