This is about a young woman who works in London as a secretary for a shipping firm. It’s a very gentle sort of story. Bel makes some unexpected new friends, starting with a neighbour, who wants to paint Bel in Bel’s rooftop garden, and someone she knew slightly at school, who invites Bel to stay with her in the country.

Although it’s not just gardening and picturesque scenery and new friendships -- Bel also encounters difficulties at work while her boss is overseas on a business trip. That’s very stressful for her, because Bel cares a lot about her job and she doesn’t have any family she can turn to in a crisis. I could predict how everything would all ultimately turn out -- but I was surprised by some of the turns the story took before it got there.

Verdict: Delightful.

Gradually, in spite of the soot and the smoke and the depredations of pigeons, the flat roof had become a tiny garden, a piece of the country wedged in amongst the bricks and mortar of the city. Some plants refused to grow, they pined for their proper milieu as Bel herself had pined, but others consented to bloom quite cheerfully. They had to be coaxed, of course, watered and drained and repotted, their leaves sponged and their roots cosseted with bone-meal, but Bel had no other hobby and when she returned from working all day in a stuffy office it was delightful to climb out of her sitting-room window and enjoy the pleasance which she had created. The little garden was wonderfully private, it was not overlooked by the windows of the surrounding houses; she could take a deck-chair and sit there enjoying the colour and fragrance of her flowers. She could see the sky, blue and hazy above the chimneys; often she sat and watched the sky darken and the stars appear. ( )

Although ostensibly set in the 1960s, the setting for Mrs Stevenson’s novel is more Al Bowlly than Rolling Stones. It’s heroine, Bel, is never going to be one of those people who turned on, tuned in and dropped out. No, she is an orphan with a London flat furnished nicely from the remnants of her great aunt’s house – so I imagined lovely Edwardian walnut pieces and some pretty china to make her flat light and bright just as she makes a terrace garden on the roof between the chimney pots amidst the rather dark times she goes through alone in London. The plot is quite timeless – there’s no hint of the welfare state to ease Bel’s troubles – about how a single girl having to work for her living makes her way with few friends or exceptional talents in a cruel metropolis. A comfort read for adults but with just a hint of menance.

www.geocities.com/Heartland/Garden/1024/character.html