Customer Reviews
Down To The Last Million? - By: ianrmillard, 11 Aug 2008 
This book first came out in 1972. It tells the tale of how this lady & her husband took over Herm, one of the Channel Islands. Although an interesting read in parts, there were some aspects displeasing: the lady had served in FANY, a WW2 organization providing backup for the SOE saboteurs & guerrilla fighters. Her husband, an officer, returned to the UK & they were offered the chance to buy the island (Crown lease of). Fortunately, these people both came from "manor house" backgrounds & papa (on her side) was a businessman who thought nothing of chartering a plane...you get the picture. And they do seem to have, beneath the English country gentry gentility, a bit of landlordist arrogance: in their first home, they find that the previous owner has a sitting tenant under the then law, which they knew about when they bought it, but they try to chuck him out into the strezet because they want his half of the house. After that fails, they go to Herm and, after a while, discover that a "charming Irishman & his wife" are tenants of theirs (which they did not know, his pleasant house was so overgrown & hidden!) & they were returning to Eire. This, says the authoress, "saved us the unpleasant job of giving them notice"...(!) One hopes that she is one day chucked out of her home, so that she knows what it is like. The whole book is written in a gollygosh jolly hockeysticks way which, after a while, pallls. Herm is now a kind of massive holiday business, which I suppose is the achievement of this lady & her family, but is it better for that? The whole book, in a rather English way, conceals the privileges to which these people are heir: they are reallly not quite the struggling young couple they try to present. Still, worth a read, overalll.
