FACTS AND FICTIONS: Some Literary Recollections

Ann Bridge's Fictions are based on some of the backgrounds as well as the Facts so prominently detailed here, from the time when her husband joined the Foreign Office and they left Bridge End, wistaria, pullets and all, with their three youngsters for Peking. Forced back to England by their children's illnesses, Mrs. Bridge began to write and since she needed the money, it was fortunate that Peking Picnic and Illyrian Spring were ""resounding"" successes. Later Ambassadorial posts in the thirties took them to Mexico, to Hungary during the phoney war and then the real one when she was incensed by the failures of the British Red Cross, on to Moscow -- dense and glum, and return home again the long way round. Hollywood with its covert ""inhumanity"" frightened her; in New England she was more attuned; in Turkey they stayed at length and years later she accomplished her not too fictional account of Ataturk once seen in a Panama hat. Back in London she gets to visit the Queen, pretty and common-sensical, and so it goes on in this polyglot life of many posts in high places. Throughout there are the well-travelled touches along with the ""marvellous gardens"" and ""delightful creatures"" which keeps this forever England in tone. But her readers, and they are many, will like her and like it once again.