During my mad “Oh My Great Tulu! The Deaccession Squad is taking away All The Books!” frenzy, I trolled the internet to find disappearing treasures and snapped up six books in a white hot heat including some titles I had lurking in Amazon wish lists. Strike while the iron (and the Awesomebooks UK coupon codes) are hot and all that. And among three grey bundles shoved into my mailbox with the stamp of the Royal Mail? Noel Streatfeild’s Tea by the Nursery Fire.

Why this book? Well, first I adore Noel Streatfeild and have read just about everything my library system can cough up by her (including <shudder> Thursday’s Child and The Children on the Top Floor) and second, as much as I long to re-read the Bell family series and get my hands on Beyond the Vicarage, my conscience and bank account aren’t willing to spend the money. But $5 Noel Streatfeild book about Victorian nanny? Sure why not?

Tea by the Nursery Fire: A Children’s Nanny at the Turn of the Century (also published as Gran-Nannie) is the story of Emily Huckwell, the nanny who raised Noel Streatfeild’s father and his siblings. For anyone fortunate enough to have read Noel Streatfeild’s semi-autobiographical novel, A Vicarage Family, this is the same old nanny who all the Strangeway aunts and uncles adore and has everyone racing up to the old nursery for Gran-Nannie’s strong beef tea (called “Golden Sovereigns”) the second they arrive at the family estate. However, don’t try and fit Tea by the Nursery Fire: A Children’s Nanny at the Turn of the Century in the Strangeways timeline because the Strangeway children are born in the 1890s vs Tea by the Nursery Fire: A Children’s Nanny at the Turn of the Century’s version of Isobel/Victoria/Louise who are born in the 1910s. Pop an Advil, pour yourself a nice cup of Lady Grey tea and consider Tea by the Nursery Fire: A Children’s Nanny at the Turn of the Century an alternate universe.

Another thing to consider, even though it just might be the aftereffects of diving into Tea by the Nursery Fire: A Children’s Nanny at the Turn of the Century after a nasty bout of sickness, but if you’ve read Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford series, you might just forget which book you’re reading for a bit. The lives both Laura (Lark Rise to Candleford) and Emily/Nannie/Gran-Nannie lead are very similar especially in Tea by the Nursery Fire: A Children’s Nanny at the Turn of the Century‘s Part One-The Child. Both girls are the eldest child of a village family forced in the work world at an early age. Thanks to their father’s professions and mother’s service at the big house, both girls are raised a cut above the rest of the village children. They’re not the girls getting knocked up by farm hands in the hedgerows and doomed to a live in a tiny and overcrowded cottage popping out a baby a year. But instead of the post office, Emily/Nannie/Gran-Nannie goes off to raise other people’s children.

Even though the timeline and 100% accuracy of Emily story is in question (the back cover proclaims the the book is drawn on fact and family legend and my brain says more legend than fact), Tea by the Nursery Fire: A Children’s Nanny at the Turn of the Century gives an interesting (and brief) portrait of what life held for women at the time. You have Emily’s mother who trades brutal working hours for marriage and a narrow living even if it was better than most of her village contemporaries, Emily’s mistress (the spoiled daughter of a wealthy family who might have married a bit below her) with her lack of maternal instinct and caring only for herself and her oldest nursling John’s wife Alice (Victoria/Noel’s mother) who marries quite young and is implied she is marrying partly for love and to escape her family). Emily/Nannie/Gran-Nannie has a chance at love which is snatched away by an accident and spends her life raising children that aren’t hers biologically but might as well be for all the attention and love they get from their mother. And you have to wonder if Sylvia (the mistress of the house) ever wanted to boot out Emily/Nannie/Gran-Nannie because the children like her so much better than their biological mother.

Tea by the Nursery Fire: A Children’s Nanny at the Turn of the Century isn’t just for the Noel Streatfeild fanatics. Given the revival in interest of all things Victorian and Edwardian (hey there Downton Abbey and Gosford Park!), Tea by the Nursery Fire: A Children’s Nanny at the Turn of the Century should appeal to readers who want to know more about a vanished era. And of course, Tea by the Nursery Fire: A Children’s Nanny at the Turn of the Century would make a fine little BBC One film…