Forsythia
A Memoir of Lost Generations
by
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Whether it was to stress his profession or an expression of his relative poverty, Bosinney dressed somewhat casually for this fashionable gathering.
Aunt Hester remarked on this as she spread the gossip with Ann. Apparently, June had brought Bosinney to meet her and her sister Juley earlier at their house in the Bayswater Road.
“He came in a soft, grey hat—not even a new one—a dusty thing with a shapeless crown. So extraordinary my dear, so odd!”
Whether ashamed of his hat or not, Bosinney did not hand it to the butler, but sat it on a chair in the hall.
“I tried to shoo it off the chair,” Hester whispered, “I took it for a strange, disreputable cat—Tommy had such disgraceful friends! Can you imagine, I was disturbed when it did not move.”
And so the story spread around the room. Had Bossinney given a soft, grey hat to the butler this day? Where was his top hat? George Forsyte, Roger’s son, who was the one Forsyte to team up with Winifred’s rakish husband, Dartie, and who liked a flutter himself, on hearing Aunt Hester’s story, grinned.
“The hat must have been worn as a practical joke! Very haughty,” he said, “the wild Buccaneer!”
And so it was that this name for Bosinney was whispered around the room. Bosinney was a misfit, so they called him “The Buccaneer.”
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About the Book
Encased within the drama of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, Peter Hovenden Longley weaves an autobiographical reminiscence of his own English family from the 1880s to the 1960s. Brought up in the last days of ‘Forsythia’, a world of the 3 percent born in privilege to serve the British Empire, Longley celebrates his family’s lost generations. Nothing—neither the abdication of the king and emperor, Edward VIII, in 1936, nor Adolf Hitler’s relentless bombs—could shake the British people’s conviction that theirs was the eternal kingdom. Doggedly, they believed that after a good cup of strong, Indian tea, and a game of croquet on the lawn, ‘Forsythia’ would go on forever. Forced to accept that the world they once loved was changing around them, Longley’s family and their peers struggled to adapt to a new reality.
With the permission of the Galsworthy estate, Longley analyzes The Forsyte Saga and reflects on the impact of this work of literature. His was the last generation of ‘Forsytes’, witnesses to those final rays that filtered across the empire on which they all thought the sun would never set.
Fans of popular Edwardian-period shows like Downton Abbey, will fall in love with this hefty tome that examines the culture of that alluring time period through parallel lenses.
—SAN FRANCISCO BOOK REVIEW/SACRAMENTO BOOK REVIEW
About the Author
Historian, artist, and theologian Peter Hovenden Longley was the estate manager of Tullamaine Castle in Ireland for eleven years. He then went to sea as a cruise director, including ten years aboard the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth 2. He graduated from Cambridge University, published five novels, and now works in horticulture in Springfield, Missouri.