A flying chance

The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club ★★★★
Helen Simonson
Bloomsbury

Since stealing readers’ hearts with her 2014 debut novel, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, which was followed by The Summer Before the War (2016), Helen Simonson now satisfies fans with her third book of historical fiction, The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club.

Set in the summer of 1919 at the end of World War 1, we meet Constance Haverhill. She's recently suffered the loss of her mother and, being blamed by her sister-in-law for the death of her young child, she finds herself without a home or prospects. She spent most of the war managing the estate of family friends but has been rendered jobless and near penniless now that the men are returning to work.

Having nursed Mrs Fog, the grandmother of the family friends through a bad bout of influenza, she finds herself accompanying the little old lady to the (fictional) seaside town of Hazelbourne-on-Sea, partly as a thank you for her efforts, and partly to ensure Mrs Fog’s full recovery.

Unsure what her future will hold once her hotel holiday comes to an end, Constance is thrust into a world entirely unknown to her when she meets Poppy Wirrall, a headstrong young woman who runs a ladies’ motorcycle club and is hell-bent on making a success out of employing women to run her taxi and delivery service. Many in Poppy’s employ are heading up households and find themselves unable to live off the meagre wartime pensions they receive as widows.

It seems a logical choice for Constance to pursue employment as a governess were she not to default to the obvious choice society deems most feasible: marriage. “It mortified her that still — after a world war, after her own service to the family, after her precious certificates earned via correspondence school — even the most well-meaning of friends and family continued to see marriage, any marriage, as her preferred future.”

Indeed, it’s a world that may have survived the war, but the reader soon finds that much has remained unchanged. Most mothers believe no lady should appear in the newspaper outside of her wedding announcement, and many still believe it to be improper for young women to wander about town without a chaperone, to the point of Constance being denied the right to dine in the hotel restaurant on her own.

In the face of these everyday frustrations, Constance finds herself enthralled by Poppy and the company she keeps, if less than beguiled by Harris, Poppy’s brother who lost his leg in an airplane crash during the war.

As she spends more time getting to know the ladies of the Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle Club, she soon finds herself drawn into plans to expand the enterprise after Poppy bids on a broken-down airplane and Constance volunteers for a risky role in it, all out of the desire to help out a new friend. And, in so doing, she discovers that there’s more to the brooding Harris than she first judged him for.

But soon it might all be in vain. The women have performed spectacularly standing in for the men during the war, but with the looming War Practices Act, which will require that men who have returned from the war be given back their jobs, it seems women’s progress towards economic empowerment is becoming all but lost. Even Poppy’s business is being threatened. There’s also Mrs Fog, who only hopes to finally find love after a lifetime of being denied. And then there’s the introduction two Indian war officers who appear to be more than meets the eye — if you take the time to get to know them outside of society’s withering gaze.

Simonson takes her time setting the scene for her third novel, but if you persevere you will find yourself won over. The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club is filled with wisdom; heart-rendering moments; and social commentary on feminism, racism and classism that, sadly, still applies to the world in 2025. It’s a book of historical fiction meets romance meets a heartwarming coming-of-age story of a girl who could have been any one of us in a post-war English society.