The discovery of a cache of long-lost love letters might be an over-familiar inspiration for a memoir, risking a bit of a dusty lane indulgence – a charming, nostalgic featherbed flop into a past romance. But although the events described by this delightful nonagenarian first-time author took place three-quarters of a century ago, there is nothing sepia-flattened about Gill Johnson’s writing. This is a book which shimmers with remarkable recall as the author returns us to the post-war vibrancy of Venice and the dazzling inhabitants who transformed her young life.

The youngest of four children, Gill reached adulthood in Blitz-scarred, rationed 1950s London. She shared a depressing, claustrophobic Westminster flat with her snobbish parents, who, unhappy with each other and life, planned for her to marry a cabinet minister ‘with boundless promise’. Her mother ‘drifted about like a mournful mannequin’ and her emasculated father, like most people then, was ‘waiting for things to improve’, as the grandfather clock in the Victorian parlour marked the dreary passage of time.

But Gill was not prepared to wait. A fledgling romance with a penniless architect called David Ross (the pair bonded over shared matriarchal challenges) seemed to be going well until David left London to work in Paris. Craving an adventure of her own, Gill, aged 25, lands a summer job in Venice with one of Italy’s oldest aristocracies. The Contessa (whose family owned Fiat cars) and her Conte needed someone to teach their two small sons English. Ditching her clerical job at the National Gallery, Gill plucks up the courage to tell her father, and is distressed by the look of ‘terrified loneliness’ in his eyes at the prospect of being left alone with his wife. 

It was a dazzling existence of painted ceilings, marble busts, tapestried halls, curlicues and episcopal thrones

Marvelling at ‘that pile of precariously stacked architecture floating above the water’ as she arrives in Venice, Gill boards her new employers’ motoscafo, ‘to be carried across the Adriatic towards the Serenissima, past the magnificent faded grandeur of the palazzi that line the water’s edge’. The Palazzo Brandolini, a spectacular 15th-century ‘Gothic pile’, will be her new home, and the immaculate Conte, with his ‘uncrimped complexion’ and hand-trimmed eyelashes, advises her that visitors come to the city ‘for love, not destruction’. 

Engulfed in a ‘gilded labyrinth’, she enjoys a dazzling existence of painted ceilings, marble busts, tapestried halls, curlicues and episcopal thrones. With boats, white-gloved butlers and maids – who have their own maids – at her disposal, Gill finds herself ‘happy with happiness’. Everyone, from the Conte and Contessa, their children and their squad of uniformed staff, welcome her to this glittering court – with one exception. Nurse Fräulein Rasch, a carbolic-stinking, Roald Dahlesque ‘seething cauldron of hate’, resents the young British upstart who has now become the darling of the household.

An incisive, more reliable and funnier narrator than Nick Carraway, Gill leads us into a Gatsby world sparkling with wealth, ambition and narcissism – ‘those with international hairstyles that have seen better days’ and those ‘still seeking a rainbow’. As her romance with David in Paris progresses through a sequence of wonderful letters in which she describes her Venetian adventure, she also records her own coming of age as she learns not only about the historical treasures of her surroundings but about the emotional gems of friendship that exist across cultures and generations.

One day, while sunbathing on the Lido, channelling the spirit of Linda Radlett, although more in pursuit of independence than love, Gill actually meets Linda’s creator. A seemingly lonely Nancy Mitford, ‘with eyelids that draped like curtains, making her look intelligent and difficult’, befriends her, and an unlikely, touching and hilarious relationship ensues as the two discuss their shared admiration of Georgette Heyer, their love of Titian and their fascination with nail polish.

Occasionally the Venetian gilt rubs off as Gill identifies the ‘dispossessed, displaced and distressed’ who cling to this ephemeral hedonism, ‘trying to sustain their precarious lives’. Yet running beneath the surface is the powerful current of motherhood. Unlike Gill’s brittle mother, the Contessa cherishes her maternal role, emphasising the importance of ‘the mama figure… something we care very deeply about’.

Combining a Barbara Pym-like precision in evoking the puzzles and humanity of life with a Mitfordian sense of exuberance and whimsicality, this is a delicious book. I hope for a sequel.