Apricot sky by Ruby Ferguson + Campbells, Etiquette, Hamlet

Apricot Sky by Ruby Ferguson

published 1952

 

 

 

Apricot Sky was recommended in the comments after I blogged last year on Death on Tiptoe – which is by the same author under a different name, RC Ashby.

Di McDougall5 November 2025 at 18:29

Do you know Apricot Sky by Ruby Ferguson? It is a really lovely book, and as I recall quite a bit of clothes talk! 

…and she was not wrong, and I am grateful for the tipoff.

It is published – of course – by my friends at the Dean St Press in their Furrowed Middlebrow imprint, where it fits very exactly. It put me in mind of books by O Douglas and DE Stevenson, both featured here lately (use tags below), and whatever snarkiness I produce, these books are all a source of enjoyment for me.

So this is a story where nothing much happens. A happy posh Scottish family is spending the summer welcoming back a daughter who has been in the US, and preparing for the wedding of another daughter. There isn’t much jeopardy, the happy couple are not going to split up because of some stupid argument (we’re not Patricia Wentworth) and the other daughter – well, will she find love? You guess. Hope this isn’t a spoiler. Will there be nice weather for the wedding is about as far as the jeopardy goes.

There is another generation, some cheery children – readers of the book have been known to say that their chapters are like Swallows & Amazons, or the Famous Five (again, tags below). Not as edgy, I would say 😉. These children have been orphaned in the war, and are living with their grandparents, though there is zero detail about what happened, and how both mother AND father died, and whether there is more family on the other side – they are just plonked there with no explanation.

Everyone – but particularly the children – is obsessed by food, but that’s fair enough when rationing was so recent. Picnics in particular are paid a lot of attention.

There’s the usual irritating snobbery and class-consciousness, and a lot of Scotland-is-best-down-with-everywhere-else, which is less annoying.

And Di is so right – it is FULL of clothes, so I’m going to concentrate on that:

 

She wore a bracken-coloured tweed coat and skirt bought yesterday in London, an American-tailored blouse, a felt hat to match the tweed, sheer nylon stockings, and low-heeled Oxfords of a pleasing shade of brown.

 

 

Primrose lay on a sun-warmed rock which burned pleasantly through the brown cotton shorts and faded pink thread jumper which were her sole attire.

 

She took some tea up to her room—she had forgotten about lunch—and lying flat on her back on the bed wondered which dress she should wear for Neil. She finally decided on her new chiffon print, red hibiscus flowers on a white ground, and hoped she was not wasting her time. She spent a long time over her dressing and thought the result quite creditable.

 

She was a golden girl, and wore a skin-fitting suit of maize-coloured linen and exquisite shoes.

Tea was just over when a car drew up and out stepped Inga Duthie, in white sharkskin and looking dazzling, accompanied by three young men in tennis flannels with Air Force tunics slung over their shoulders.

 

A while back I did this post:

Favourite Quotes, Lines and Sentences

And one of my listed key moments was from Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes (great blog favourite, and, you will NEVER get the chance to forget, the source of my communal Edgar nomination and trip to New York), about the longstanding blood feud between the MacDonalds and the Campbells. So I was glad to find here, from a discussion among parents of their marriageable daughters:

“I dare say in ten years’ time we’ll be glad for the girls to marry anything, even Campbells.”

This came up in the comments on a recent post – jumble sales, since you ask – and in investigating the Massacre I came across this on Wiki:

'Slaughter under trust', a Scottish act introduced in 1587 to reduce endemic feuding. The law applied to murder committed in "cold-blood", when articles of surrender had been agreed, or hospitality accepted. It was first used in 1588 against Lachlan Mor Maclean, whose objections to his mother's second marriage led him to murder his new stepfather, John MacDonald, and 18 members of the wedding party.

I don’t wish to sound callous but it makes Hamlet look pretty feeble doesn’t it?

And we gave it all an enjoyable going-over in this week's post on a Max Murray book, as we looked at the etiquette of murder, and the behavious or hosts. See the comments on this post. 

Royal Bed for a Corpse by Max Murray

Altogether a most enjoyable read. Thank you Di.

 One of the pictures above features a Barbie doll - can you work out which one? It has featured before for an Agatha Christie short story:

Tuesday Night Club: Christie on holiday

- not the only Christie moment where an eye-catching dress and a large hat are used to effect. I have never found a better picture of a suitable flowered, brightly-coloured dress.

Girl in shorts, a 1958 photo from the Florida archives via Flickr.