The last September - Elizabeth Bowen

The famly at the 'big house' are in an equivocal position. Interest and tradition should make them support the British but affection ties them to the now resistant people of the surrounding country. Meanwhile, tennis parties and dances are still held, against a background of ambushes and burings. Young officers dance and flirt, or, armed, they patrol the countryside. Faint vibrations of trouble which she cannot understand reach the young girl Lois, who at the same time takes nothing for granted: hse is a child of the transition period. Time is not standing still, and no one really belives that it is. Fate is moving in the direction of this apparently immune and remote place. The young are set to be desolating free, the old desolated, by a violent act.