Enough Blue Sky

In December 1939, during the fraught pause before the storm that would shatter Europe, the Franklin family, June and her three daughters and son, accompanied by their Swiss governess, set out from their Hampshire home to join the paterfamilias, an admiral stationed in Gilbraltar. The British author made just such a voyage when she was seven, the age of Roz, the clever, sharp-eyed protagonist through whose perceptions much of this journey unfolds. Nothing dramatic or even surprising occurs: the little band makes a slow progress toward their destination, talking, gossiping, remembering, speculating, anticipating. Did Mademoiselle have a colorful ""past''? Will Italy come into the war? What of Nanny, who stayed behind in England? In ``feel,'' the novel is more memoir than fiction; the remembered life must have been quite like thatthe boy withdrawn into a dignified manly silence from all those females, the adolescent girl exploring the ways of womanhood. North's prose is very polite, mannerly, subdued, decorous. For long stretches the Rock seems galaxies away, as if they'll never get there. November