Foreword - The Golden Hours

The following background is intended for those readers who are unfamiliar with the Cazalet Chronicles, the series of novels whose first five volumes are The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion, Casting Off and All Change. And for those for whom it has been a long time.

William and Kitty Cazalet, known to their family as the Brig and the Duchy, are both long dead now, and their four children – an unmarried daughter, Rachel, and three sons – are in their sixties.

Hugh is with his second wife, Jemima, whom he met at Cazalets’, the now-defunct family timber company. Between them they have six children: Hugh’s Polly, Simon and Wills by his late wife Sybil, Jemima’s twin boys from her first marriage, and their daughter Laura, born in 1950.

Hugh and Sybil’s daughter Polly married Gerald Lisle, Earl of Fakenham. She lives with him and their four children, twin girls Janie and Eliza, and two boys Andrew and Pen, at his demanding ancestral home, Fakenham Hall in Norfolk. Her brother Simon lives there with them. Her other brother, Wills, is in the army.

Edward is divorced from both Villy, his first wife, mother of Louise, Teddy, Lydia and Roly, and from Diana, his second, with whom he has two children. He is uncertain of his role in life. Villy lives on the south coast, and feels that her life is over.

Edward and Villy’s daughter Louise married at nineteen, and had a son, Sebastian. She abandoned him when she left her husband, the portrait painter Michael Hadleigh. Michael then moved to New York with his new wife, Rowena, taking five-year-old Sebastian with them. Louise now lives in London with her friend Stella Rose, a journalist, working in Soho as an actors’ agent. Her lover of many years, Joseph Waring, is a married man.

Her brother Teddy has left the UK to work as a commercial pilot in West Africa. Their sister Lydia lives in Edinburgh, and younger brother Roly works in finance in the Far East.

Rupert, a painter, who was missing in France during the Second World War, has rebuilt his life in west London with his second wife, Zoë, and their son Georgie. They live with his daughter Clary (from his first wife, Isobel) and her husband, his old friend Archie Lestrange, in a house in Mortlake where the two men run an art school. Clary and Archie have three children, Harriet, Bertie and Buttercup. Clary’s brother Neville, a photographer and would-be filmmaker, lives in New York. Juliet, the daughter who was born to Rupert and Zoë in 1940, after Rupert’s disappearance, has also left home.

Rachel, bereft of her beloved partner Margaret Sidney, known as Sid, continues to live for others at Fakenham Hall, where Polly and Gerald have taken her in.

The Golden Hours begins at Christmas 1962.