Mrs Henrey's s Year

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30586, 31 October 1964, Page 4

Mrs Henrey 's s Year

Wednesday at Four. (A Year in My Life.) Mrs Robert Henrey. Dent. 251 pp.

A year in the life of this amazing woman includes a Buckingham Palace gardenparty (on Wednesday at four), and trips to the Mediterranean, Russia, and Coronation street. A Frenchwoman, married to an Englishman, Mrs Henrey divides her time between a flat in London and a small farm in France. Her pen portraits of her French neighbours are most entertaining, and her observations of the Royal garden-party are refreshingly different. Returning briefly to France, she learns that she has been invited on a Mediterranean cruise, which she finds restful and at the same time stimulating. Baek in her London home she is prepared to stay and write her impressions of the cruise, but is interrupted by the granting of a long-awaited visa to Russia. With some justifiable trepidation she finds herself aboard a Russian aircraft, and in no time is drinking champagne and eating caviare. The lights of Moscow rise from the darkness, and she sets foot on Russian soil to find that Intourist are expecting a man! It transpires that Russian women do not use the prefix “Miss” or “Mrs.” Thus she has been announced as Robert Henrey. She tours the stores, Red Square and the Kremlin, and then goes by train to Leningrad. Her Intourist guide, unlike her Moscow counterpart, evades any leading questions on religion, war, or politics, and one receives the impression that with some people in Russia these are “Niet” subjects, although others speak quite freely and with an apparent lack of fear. In many ways she is sorry to leave, but she returns to England, to learn that her beloved farm has been burgled in her absence.

A chance meeting revives a former ambition to visit Coronation street (of the television series), so off to Manchester she goes, leaving her husband to cope with the burglary. The street, although its homes and shops resemble the television image it projects, are content to watch their “lives” on their sets, rather than create new niches for themselves.

This visit brings to an end a very busy year in the life of Mrs Robert Henrey, who makes the reader feel he has lived through all the incidents with her, and who forges that happy bond of friendship between author and reader.