My Turn to Make the Tea

INTRODUCED BY LISSA EVANS

‘I envy anyone yet to discover the joy of Monica Dickens. She’s beady eyed, big hearted and blissfully funny’ NINA STIBBE

‘Wherever her eye falls, it finds the exact, significant detail, and her ear for dialogue is unerring’ OBSERVER

‘Monica’s naked curiosity and general bolshiness are easy to identify with’ LISSA EVANS

Poppy, newly recruited cub reporter at the Downingham Post, is determined to prove to the editor that he’s wrong in his belief that ‘Women are a nuisance in the office’. He certainly doesn’t think she’s a nuisance when it’s time for the tea round – a job which never fails to fall to the only female reporter.

What Poppy lacks in experience, she makes up for in spirit and ambition. She’ll make the Downingham Post the best regional newspaper there is – even if she occasionally gets the names wrong in court hearings. Life for a single professional woman in the post-war years certainly has its challenges – from finding a room, when the tyrannical landlady doesn’t consider Poppy to be quite respectable to changing her editor’s deeply entrenched ways. This semi-autobiographical novel, recounted with Monica Dickens’s wit, warmth and wry observation will charm all who read it.

If you enjoyed My Turn to Make the Tea, you will love One Pair of Feet, Dickens’s novel of being a wartime trainee nurse, also published in Virago Modern Classics.

Author Biography

Monica Dickens MBE (1915-1992) was the great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens. Expelled from St Paul’s Girls’ School, she was then sent to a finishing school in France, before returning home to life as a debutante.

She then spent two years as a cook and general servant, which she wrote about in her first book, One Pair of Hands (1939). The book published when she was twenty-four, was a bestseller and established her reputation as a writer. During the Second World War, Dickens trained as a nurse and again successfully recounted her experiences in One Pair of Feet (1942).

In her career she wrote over fifty books for both adults and children, including the Follyfoot series. For twenty years, Dickens also wrote a much-loved column for Woman’s Own. She was involved with the NSPCC, the RSPCA and the Samaritans.