Good Old Anna

Marie Belloc Lowndes wrote this in 1915, while the war it describes was still being fought. The setting is Witanbury, a quiet cathedral town in southern England, and the story opens on 5 August 1914, the morning after Britain declared war on Germany. A neighbour asks the widowed Mrs. Mary Otway what she intends to do about her good old Anna, the German servant who has kept her house for exactly eighteen years. Anna has no idea that small favours she agreed to before the war, looking after a stranger’s goods and passing along messages, have made her useful to a spy ring. Lowndes cares less about battlefield heroics than about how ordinary, decent people behave once suspicion enters the drawing room, and how quickly long affection curdles into distrust.