Somewhere in England Quotes

“She stopped also to choose her favourite lamb, which had, she said, a face which showed her what people meant when they said that other people were perfect lambs.”
― Carola Oman, Somewhere in England

“when the fawning Radish presently reappeared, he addressed “You miserable hound!” so loudly and so severely, that Radish became an aspen leaf, and an obsequious Eastern slave, and the Serpent of Eden—”Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.” Radish closed his eyes and shrank upon the mire, trembling in every limb, waiting for the quietus.”
― Carola Oman, Somewhere in England

“Is Major Hungerford little?” asked Pippa. “No, he’s six foot two,” said Mrs Taylor. “Diminutives denote affection.”
― Carola Oman, Somewhere in England

“As soon as you have a settled home,” said the Dowager grandly, “get some dogs. Never allow yourself to fall into the error of having a single pet. Always have a young one coming on to fill the sad gap.”
― Carola Oman, Somewhere in England

“Young ears are very quick. I had not heard anything, although my hearing is above the average. I called out to ask her whether these were some of our Went bombers returning from the raid. She answered, sounding quite shocked, ‘Oh, no! Not coming home. Cologne is only two and a half to three flying hours from here, under favourable conditions. This must mean that they’re going out again to-night.”
― Carola Oman, Somewhere in England

“Pippa, who was devouring the Greenmantle omnibus volume in her bedroom every night at present, longed to hint that Nazi agents were probably objecting even more strongly to the activities of Colonel Hungerford.”
― Carola Oman, Somewhere in England

“I’m about to enter my twenty-third year,” repeated Elizabeth, her dark eyes filling with tears. “It’s not natural, the life I’m living here—a housemaid without even any fun on my evening off.” “A very wise friend of mine said to me the other day, in a letter,” remembered Mrs. Hungerford, “I think that this should be called ‘The Lonely War.’ Most people are separated from those they love best just now. Nearly all are having to contend with some difficulties, and some with very great difficulties. . .”
― Carola Oman, Somewhere in England

“She remembered that people seldom ask for your advice except when they have already made up their minds.”
― Carola Oman, Somewhere in England

“Mary listened, to the sounds made by the traffic in the cobbled street outside, and thought how odd it was that it had needed a second German War to bring back to English county towns at noon the sound of horses’ hoofs as a predominant note.”
― Carola Oman, Somewhere in England

“But surely, Florence, you can’t imagine that Mrs. Hungerford and I invented this War for our own enjoyment?” to which Florence in the most lofty and knowing manner, had replied, “Well, as to that, Madam, this is a free country still, and everyone is at liberty to form their own opinions.”
― Carola Oman, Somewhere in England

“However, I just feel that I must have a few months of London first, after the dreadful time I’ve been through since 1939. I never touch chocolate biscuits,” she added, waving an impatient hand as Reeny set the tray in front of the guest, on a coffin stool, from which she had carefully removed a used ash-tray and a packet of outsize envelopes. “Thank you, nurse,” said Mary. “You may take away the biscuits.” When the door closed behind the abashed Reeny, “Why have you had a more dreadful time than anyone else since 1939?” she inquired.”
― Carola Oman, Somewhere in England

“For Mrs. Hungerford had been born in 1897, the daughter of an English country house, and when she had attended her first home nursing lectures in Went Town Hall, in August 1914, an ex-nurserymaid had accompanied her in the dog-cart on this dark and dangerous expedition. She had been brought up distinctly on what used to be called “pre-war” lines.”
― Carola Oman, Somewhere in England

“A Botticelli, attired in blue serge,” said “My Colleague,” making his appearance at this moment”
― Carola Oman, Somewhere in England

“She would have liked to take Radish cowslipping, but Lalage had instructed her that one of the first unwritten rules of country life was never to take a pack of your own dogs to a strange house, where the hostess may possess jealous bloodhounds or be a dog-loather; and after several expeditions in his company,”
― Carola Oman, Somewhere in England

“I simply don’t know what I’m to do with her for three weeks in Westbury-on-the-Green. I mean, who on earth can one ask to meet her down here? And if she gets bored, she has her heart attacks. And of course one has no petrol.”
― Carola Oman, Somewhere in England

“he was getting rather wobbly nowadays, and disliked being caught out by a strange face. Mrs. Hungerford asked Glover how his mother was, and Pippa was staggered to think that somebody so wobbly could have a mother alive, and further staggered to hear that she was getting on nicely with her new glasses, thank you, madam.”
― Carola Oman, Somewhere in England

“Its lounge hall was already full of wet outer garments, and from a room on the left came a noise suggestive of a monkey-house.”
― Carola Oman, Somewhere in England

“He does paint,” admitted Lalage, “but in the modern way. I don’t understand it. The maddening thing is that he can draw perfectly beautifully, or used to be able to.”
― Carola Oman, Somewhere in England

“It was horrible to be eighteen, and not wanted, and she had never meant to be pushing, and of course, if she had thought for a moment before she spoke, she would have realized that Elizabeth and Lalage, who were twenty-one and twenty-two, couldn’t want to go out with her. Probably Lalage had been bored to death by all her questions about country people and things, and had been longing to shake her off, but had been too kind-hearted. Probably Elizabeth had agreed with Lalage that she would do the snubbing.”
― Carola Oman, Somewhere in England

“She very nearly died just before Christmas,” yelled Mrs. Taylor, looking skywards again in some impatience. “She got pneumonia. Mary came over every day, and so did I. There was hard frost. We were both dead tired and mingled our tears. We knew that little Greatbatch couldn’t really do anything for her, and what was worse, she knew it too. She told him when I was there one evening that she had so much hoped to see the Victory procession from the stand at her son’s club, and that it would be a great disappointment to her if she had to leave this war unfinished.”
― Carola Oman, Somewhere in England

“However, the garage was gone. You may think,” she proceeded, looking straightly at Pippa with very fine grey eyes, “that after my saying that Sally Bates was a bore about her bomb, I’m not much better myself. But you see, when a thing has happened to oneself, it is intensely interesting to one.”
― Carola Oman, Somewhere in England

“The dog knew the road here, and as soon as his guardian turned in at the park gates, he ran ahead. There were some sad moments after he had greeted me, when he searched the cloak-room and even ran down to the garage.”
― Carola Oman, Somewhere in England

“As soon as you have a settled home,” said the Dowager grandly, “get some dogs. Never allow yourself to fall into the error of having a single pet. Always have a young one coming on to fill the sad gap. Did you find rabbits interesting?”
― Carola Oman, Somewhere in England

“She tugged a bundle of dog-eared magazines from beneath the cushions of the tubular chair, and felt more comfortable, but found little solace in issues dated “Fall, 1940,” in which all the crosswords had been half done by half-wits, and the stories, after starting in a blaze of glory and meandering down the sides of stirring illustrations for a couple of pages, died upon the reader,”
― Carola Oman, Somewhere in England

“In the next cubicle, someone with a peevish voice was saying how she wished that she was in the south of France. “Oh, not now, m’lady,” shuddered her attendant, who was, Pippa surmised, no less a person than Rosalthé herself. “I don’t believe that things out there are half as bad as people make out,” lisped the peevish voice. “They just do it to stop one going anywhere where one might possibly get a little enjoyment and gaiety.”
― Carola Oman, Somewhere in England

“But they were both over twenty-one, and had come out in the summer before the War, and been finished in Paris and been to real dances and could talk about race-meetings, and evidently knew thousands of people. Although they were wearing blue cotton uniform dresses exactly like her own, they seemed a better shape, and their hair looked as if they visited the hairdresser every day. They looked quite different altogether. . . . Pippa had felt utter despair of ever attaining to their standard of sophistication when she had first caught sight of her future companions, seated side by side, in the becoming firelight, in the formal white and green staff-room at Woodside,”
― Carola Oman, Somewhere in England

“The train began to run into London suburbs, and Pippa noticed that the results of bomb damage fell into four classes. There was the type that reminded one of a child of six, lacking front teeth, there was the doll’s house, with the face open, the one-slice-out-of-a-cake variety and the spilt box of matches. She soon got accustomed to the sight of twisted, rusting girders and mounds of honey-coloured rubble, but she could not see properly without sitting right forward and goggling, and as nobody else in the carriage took the faintest interest in the view, she deemed it most dignified to follow their example. The truth was that, as Auntie Prue was one of the few women in England who had moved her abode hastily in 1939 to a site where bombs did not presently follow, Pippa, in 1942, was in the extraordinary position of never having seen even a crater.”
― Carola Oman, Somewhere in England

“he could not help leaving all the dirt on the soap and the towels in the downstairs cloak-room, and breaking the string of the bathroom black-out, and borrowing one’s new, fourteen-coupon Burberry, and forgetting it in the ’bus. His two ruling passions—wireless and destruction—might even be useful in a few years’ time, if you sent him off for an enemy target with a load of bombs.”
― Carola Oman, Somewhere in England