The company we kept

In 1938, after three years of sharing a house in London with a moody, elderly Russian who was translating Tchekhov, Barbara Kaye and her husband, Percy Muir, moved to a Tudor cottage in north-west Essex, in joyful anticipation of at last having a home to themselves. While she coped with a young daughter, domestic crises, a garden and chickens - and tried to write a novel - he commuted to London to carry on his antiquarian book business at Elkin Mathews in Duke Street. Eighteen months later, on the eve of war, the business and a member of staff joined the exodus of evacuees from London and were found house-room, along with parents and a dog, in the Muirs' draughty and already over-crowded cottage. In this entertaining and very personal sequel to Percy Muir's Minding My Own Business, Barbara Kaye describes the struggle to keep the firm of Elkin Mathews going while, at the same time the Muirs gave hospitality to an egotistical author engaged on a book on women, an eccentric poet, the originator of James Bond, and other friends who came for temporary refuge from the Blitz.