Chapter 1 Summary and Analysis

Vera views World War I as an interruption to her own personal plans. She introduces herself in this first chapter. Her father's family is from Staffordshire and are mostly businessmen and country gentlemen. Her mother is the daughter of a musician who has migrated to Stoke-on-Trent from Wales. Her parents meet when her father takes singing lessons from her maternal grandfather. Her parents live in Newcastle-under-Lyme in a little villa on Sidmouth Road.

Vera grows up in a middle class environment. She remembers her childhood as happy and uneventful, a household in which she and her brother Edward grow up in a house full of music. Vera reads whatever she can find to read when she is a child. She also writes for her own amusement.

The family moves to Buxton when Vera is eleven because there are good day schools...