The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club

During both World Wars, women took on “men’s” jobs to fill an essential need. They built ships and cars and airplanes. They worked in armament factories. They nursed, farmed, managed businesses, drove ambulances.

Some were young and single, others middle-aged, with children at home to care for in addition to working long hours at their jobs.

Some couldn’t wait for the war to be over to get back to their former lives or to marry and begin to build the lives they dreamed of.

Some loved working jobs that mattered and dreaded going back to the old ways.

Some had no choice but to keep working, no matter what. Thousands of war widows, for example, whose pensions fell far short of their household expenses. And women without husbands or family money to support them.

Constance Haverhill, the main character in Helen Simonson’s The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club, falls into the last category.

It’s 1919. Constance spent the war very competently managing the Mercer Estate but was replaced after the Armistice. Soon, she must find paid employment—but doing what? Meanwhile, she’s at the Meredith Hotel on the seaside in Hazelbourne to look after elderly Mrs. Fog for a few weeks.

Life there is the height of elegance; guests the crème de la crème of British society—Poppy Wirrall among them. We meet her almost immediately when the imperious waiter Klaus refuses to seat her for tea due to her unladylike attire—

“…slim brown wool trousers tucked into the tops of thick black knee boots. A green tweed jacket and white silk scarf….” [Her] chestnut hair was fuzzy and loose in its pins.”

Though they’ve never met, Poppy asks Constance to lend her a skirt so she can be seated and when she does, insists that Constance join her for tea.

And, before she knows it, Consstance is drawn into the world of the Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle Club and its recently established taxi and delivery service, which employs them as drivers and mechanics.

The characters in this novel are divine.

Fierce, charming, reckless Poppy. Her brother Harrison, a fighter pilot who lost his leg in the war and is struggling to come to terms with it. Their extravagant mother Mrs. Wirrall.

There’s kind, eccentric Mrs. Fog, keeping a secret that threatens to blow up the family name. Her dreadful daughter Lady Merrill and spoiled granddaughter Rachel, about to marry rich, horrible American.

Klaus the German waiter, ostracized by the town, though he’d lived and thrived there well before the war began. Loyal Jock Mackintyre, Harrison’s mechanic during the war, grieving for his wife and daughter, lost in a bombing. The mysterious Indian Mr. Prenda.

Iris and Tilly of the motorcycle club.

And more!

The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club is brilliantly plotted, turning on—among other things—attempts to remove an abandoned German U-boat from the harbor, an auction at which Poppy means to buy tools for the taxi service but buys a wrecked Sopwith Camel instead, and a letter not meant to have been posted.

The novel’s rich language brings Hazelbourne and the people in it fully alive; the dialogue is delightful.

“Do you dance, Mr. Pendra?” asked Mrs. Wirrall. “All of England is in a craze for it.”

“I have been known to shake a leg in Paris and London,” said Pendra. “But in such a genteel environment as Hazelbourne I do not desire to—shall we say—provoke any vexation among the older generation.”

Oh, to be able to write a book like this one!

It’s tender and intelligent; hilarious, sad and true.

It offers up history, teaching readers about the appalling treatment of women in the aftermath of World War One without, well, hitting them over the head in it.

I could not put this book down. Seriously.

I read in the car (as the passenger!) on the way home from a trip for two-plus hours, got home, unpacked nothing, and sat on my bed reading until I finished. I meant to fix dinner but did not. If one can be addicted to a book, that’s what I was.

It was absolutely glorious.

I felt stunned, emerging.

It’s summer, y’all.

If this isn’t the perfect book to read on the beach (or anywhere, anytime) I don’t know what is.