It is difficult to get into Rose Macaulay’s “Dangerous Ages” once you discover that it is going to be about another one of those offensively healthy English families.  Ever since “Mr. Britling” we have been deluged with accounts from overseas of whole droves of British brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, grandfathers and grandmothers, who all get out at six in the morning and play hockey all over the place.  Each has some strange, intimate name like “Bim,” or “Pleda,” or “Goots,” and you can never tell which are the brothers and which the sisters until they begin to have children along in the tenth or eleventh chapter.

In “Dangerous Ages” they swim.  Dozens of them, all in the same family, go splashing in at once and persist in calling out health slogans to one another across the waves.  There are Neville and Rodney and Gerda and Kay, and one or two very old ladies whose relationship to the rest of the clan is never very definitely established.  Grandma, for some reason or other, doesn’t go in swimming that day, doubtless because she had already been in before breakfast and her suit wasn’t dry.

These dynamic British girls are always full of ruddy health and current information.  They go about kidding each other on the second reading of the Home Rule bill or fooling in their girlish way about the chances of the Labor candidate in the coming Duncastershire elections.  It is getting so that no novel of British life will be complete without somewhere in its pages a scene like the following: 

“A chance visitor at The Beetles some autumn morning along about five o’clock might have been surprised to see a trail of dog-trotting figures winding their way heatedly across the meadow.  No one but a chance visitor would be surprised, however, for it was well known to invited guests that the entire Willetts family ran cross-country down to the outskirts of London and back every morning before breakfast, a matter of fourteen miles.  In the lead was, of course, Dungeon in running costume, followed closely by the flaxen-haired Mid and snub-nosed Boola, then Arlix and Linny, striving valiantly for fourth place but not reckoning on the fleet-footed Meeda, who was no longer content to hobble in the vanguard with Grandpa Willetts and Grandpa’s old mother, who still insisted on cross-country running, although she had long since been put on the retired list at the Club.

[Illustration:  “Why didn’t you tell us that you were reading a paper on birth control?”]

“‘Oh, Linny,’ called out Dungeon over her shoulder, ’you young minx!  Why didn’t you tell us that you were reading a paper on Birth Control at the next meeting of the Spiddix?  Twiller just told me today.  It’s too ripping of you!’

“‘Silly goose,’ panted Linny, stumbling over a hedgerow, ’how about what the vicar said the other night about your inferiority complex?  It was toppo, and you know it.’

“’It won’t be long now before we’ll have disenfranchisement through, anyway,’ muttered Grandpa Willetts, crashing down into a stone quarry, at which exhibition of reaction a loud chorus of laughter went up from the entire family, who by this time had reached Nogroton and were bursting with health.”