History, England, domestic, 1940s--yo!

Minding the Manor
by Mollie Moran

Great, simply great. It's good that I was listening to the audiobook instead of reading words on paper, because the audio version slowed me down and didn't allow me to race through the good parts.  Funny thing, too--all the time I was listening to it, I thought it was fiction.  But from her obit (she died in 2014 at the age of 97):

Last year, after Penguin books finally persuaded her to tell her story, she found herself – aged 96 – a best-selling author. 

Another quote from the obituary:

She particularly enjoyed telling interviewers where Downton Abbey gets it slightly wrong. “I laugh when I watch Downton,” she told me.  “When you were in the kitchen you didn’t see the people upstairs.  I was answerable to the butler and the cook who were far more obsessed with class and position than any of the gentry. Most servant girls could count the number of times they saw the boss on the fingers of one hand.”

Because of the time and place where she lived and worked, her memoir gives one a feeling of "Forrest Gump deja-vu " sometimes. She was there for the silver jubilee celebration of King George V and Queen Anne, and then for King George's death and the coronation of Edward VIII. She actually saw Edward's American woman--Wallis Simpson--on the street one day. Which was after her disastrous dating of a handsome Black Shirt fellow, so she was there at two of their rallies.

I can only wish she'd taken the book farther than her marriage to an RAF airman. She did finish out those events in the afterward, so we know where everyone ended up. But I'll give her liberty to stop when she did--it was plenty long enough to be satisfying.

Wonderful!