Forest Silver is a love story but not the kind you might expect. It is steeped in the love of the Lake District, particularly Grasmere.
It’s early in World War II, but Wing-Commander Richard Blunt has already been invalided out. He has received the Victorian Cross but been told his heart is not up to much. He has also broken off his engagement. Aware that the engagement news will be published soon, he jumps on a train to the Lake District to get away from everything.
Arriving in Grasmere, he finds it stuffed with evacuees as well as vacationers. He manages to get a room, but noting an island in the lake, he decides he’d like to live there and asks who owns it. He is directed to Bonfire Hall to speak to Miss de Bainriggs.
Much to his astonishment, he finds his prospective landlord is a tall teenaged girl who dresses like a boy. She agrees to lease him the island, which is occupied by a sort of barn called a hogg-house. However, there is some unpleasantness because a Gypsy woman named Jownie Wife has been living there and has to be evicted.
Corys de Bainriggs takes seriously her ownership of the estate and is determined not to sell an inch of it even though she is broke and a wealthy evacuee is offering large sums, foreseeing that the local hotels will be commandeered. However, Jownie Wife takes her revenge on Corys by burning down the house of one of her dependents, Old John. Old John refuses to live anywhere but his own home, and because she’s afraid he will die, she sells some lake acreage to Mr. Lovely so that she can rebuild Old John’s house.
Blunt befriends Corys and eventually understands himself to be in love with her. But Corys is much too young for such things. Things are made more complicated by the appearance on the scene of Gerald Lovely, a university student, and of Maimie Ozzard, Richard’s ex-fianceé, whose parents have been killed by a bomb and has no one to turn to.
The descriptions of the area are beautiful and the picture of wartime life in a place that has to adjust to so many new people is interesting and different than the wartime stories I have read. Ward is an evocative writer and storyteller.
I received this book from the publishers in exchange for a free and fair review.
What? Me Read? 
The BL seem to be finding lots of intriguing forgotten authors for this series. I always find books written during the war interesting because the authors didn’t know the outcome. That uncertainty isn’t often captured so well in historical fiction, I find.
Yes, they do, but I seem to have fallen off their list for review copies.
I think something’s gone wrong – no one seems to be getting books from them at the moment, and they don’t seem to be getting Kindle versions listed. I think maybe the publicist has left? I’ve given up, and intend to just buy the Crime Classics if and when they arrive on Kindle. It’s easier…
Last time I asked for a review copy, I got one, but the person didn’t answer me like he usually does. Maybe you’re right and he isn’t there anymore. A friend told me that the library’s catalog got hacked earlier in the year. I wonder if something like that could have affected the press, too.
I enjoyed this one for the descriptions and the poignant time of writing, which always gets me.
Yes, and it was a little different from the other books I’ve read set during that time.