Yesterday Morning. By Diana Athill.

It's sad when you find the critic's blurbs on the cover more amusing than the book inside.

This is Diana Athill's memoir of an Edwardian girlhood.   There are some lovely scenes in "Yesterday Morning".   I thought, as I read it, that if I was the right kind of dreamer this book would give me fantasy fodder for months.  Still, it wasn't for me a very satisfying book.  It is less sharply observed than her other works, like Somewhere Toward the End, and Stet.

She describes what seems to have been an idyllic English girl's childhood, with big houses staffed with  cooks and governesses, estates to roam and ponies to ride.  (As a girl, Athill was spared the hell of the British boy's boarding school.)  Her parents fought, and she dreaded humiliation - these were the unhappy bits of her childhood, but they seem minor compared to the joys.