The Gulls Fly Inland

It is October 1939. Blanche Lancret is a French exile in England,looking after her American friend Annabelle’s baby. She iswaiting for news of Annabelle’s brother Vernon, who is serving with an ambulance unit in newly-invaded France, and of her surrogate mother TanteJulie, a rich démimondaine nursing her dying husband Otto onthe French Riviera.

To maintain her sang-froid Blanchewrites her journal, recallinghow she met Vernon as a schoolgirl, her girlhood with Tante Julie in Paris and with her father in Italy, andher inexplicable betrayal by Tante Julie’s servants, who ensure thatBlanche and Vernon failto meet at a crucial point in theircourtship.Vernon thenmarries theimperviousBostonian Leonora and Blanche believes him to be lost to herforever.UntilVernon realises that Blanche is about to sail back to Europe and appears in herstateroom asking her to stay … As the years wind forward Blanche andVernon remainseparated by otherpeople’smachinations, and only the war might set them free.

Sylvia Thompson’s glorious, passionatenovel of the 1930s and the early years of the Second World War is a sumptuousromance set in the imperturbable correctness of interwar Paris, and in fast-moving 1930s Londonand Boston. Thompson’sstorytellingis devastatinginits emotional truth. Thisis awonderfulforgotten novel from 1941, now reissued with an introduction by Faye Hammill,Professor of English at the University of Glasgow.

Beautiful and wayward, Sylvia Thompson (1903-68) was an Oxford contemporary of Dorothy L Sayers and Vera Brittain, and published 16 novels from 1921. She married the artist Theodore ‘Peter’ Luling and lived in Surrey. She had three daughters.