A Touch of Mistletoe
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’The morning I left home Mother was recovering from being poorly and she’d been sick in the vegetable basket.’
Sisters Victoria and Blanche grow up in their grandfather’s house in Warwickshire. It’s a secluded existence: their mother is a war widow with a thirst for port and sherry and their last governess leaves never to be replaced. When their grandfather dies, their mother replaces drink with housework and the girls plan their escape.
Blanche heads off to train as a model at a dubious institution in London. Vicky wants to study art but answers an ad leading her to Holland, where she tends a pack of miserable bull terriers. This is just the beginning of the sisters’ adventures, which take them from the poverty of cooking eggs over a candle in their Mornington Crescent bedsit, to a wider bohemian world, as they encounter love and the fluctuating fortunes that come when you’re open to the strange twists life can take.
First published in 1967, A Touch of Mistletoe is a unique coming-of-age story that shows Barbara Comyns’s
Barbara Comyns
Born in 1909 at Bidford-on-Avon, Barbara Comyns was educated mainly by governesses until she went to art schools in Stratfordupon-Avon and London. She started writing fiction at the age of ten and her first novel, Sisters by a River, was published in 1947. She also worked in an advertising agency, a typewriting bureau, dealt in old cars and antique furniture, bred poodles, converted and let flats, and exhibited pictures in The London Group. She was married first in 1931, to an artist, and for the second time in 1945. With her second husband she lived in Spain for eighteen years. She died in 1992.
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