The Fortnight in September

My latest Persephone treasure arrived, guiltily ordered when buying a gift for someone. This one arrived within a week of ordering, unexpectedly soon and doubly welcome. Delivery times vary widely from the UK – will it be a week, two weeks or more? On one particularly horrible occasion a book took more than a month to arrive, and I feared it was lost forever.

As soon as is remotely feasible I begin to anticipate the arrival of the small, humble padded envelope. This gives a certain lift to the end of every day, a certain sense of expectation as I open the mailbox and then, of course, a twinge of disappointment when only a pile of bills and pizza delivery flyers reveals itself to my book-hungry eyes. Finally, usually on a day when I’m a little distracted and not even expecting the book, there it is!

I rush into the house, throw the rest of the mail aside as trivia to be dealt with at a later date, tear open the envelope and feast my eyes on the dove grey volume within. First, the end papers have to be carefully examined. Persephone creates beautiful endpapers from fabrics or patterns contemporary with the setting of the book, so the plain cover opens to reveal a glorious wash of colour. Next, the bookmark, tucked carefully inside every volume, matching the endpapers and to be used only with that book. Perhaps a flick through the pages next, stopping to read a particularly enticing paragraph or two. Finally, as soon as is possible, all previous plans for the evening or day carelessly abandoned, I settle myself in the corner of the sofa that is gradually moulding itself to my shape and fall into the text. As my husband says, I’m gone.

The Fortnight in September is a ‘typical’ Persephone book, in that along with many of their other titles, it focuses on ordinary people, living their ordinary lives, happy or tragic in the way that ordinary people are. They are consistently the best books that I read.

This one deals, very simply, with the annual two-week holiday of a lower middle-class family, beginning on the evening before their departure and following them almost day by day until their return. It captures marvellously the sudden sense of liberation that holiday-eve brings. The small pleasures of getting an empty train carriage, first seeing the sea, the temptation to skip the unpacking in favour of that first walk along the beach. How, at the begining of a holiday, time extends luxuriously ahead, until the mid point is reached and the sad, inevitable, unbelievable countdown to the last day begins.

For 20 years the Stevens’ have been staying at ‘Seaview’, a B&B in Bognor that they first visited on their honeymoon and to which they have returned faithfully every year since. Over the years, Seaview has declined gradually and imperceptibly, until now the sheets are thin and worn, the crockery is chipped, a hole in the linoleum is patched with a strip cut from somewhere in the room where its loss will be a little less noticeable than the hole it now covers. The landlady, Mrs Huggett, is deteriorating at the same decorous pace as the building, but tries valiantly to keep up the semblance of comfort and hospitality.

As the characters relax and exchange their confining city-clothes for worn but comfortable items, so they throw off some of the constraints that sustain them in their working lives. Mr Stevens touches on the faded bruise of a promotion he didn’t get; Dick, the grown-up son is struggling to swap the modest success of school life for the dull anonymity of work; Mary, the grown-up daughter, has her first brush with love. Only nervous, bullied, Mrs Stevens remains the same as she is at home, unable even to change her outward appearance: ‘she was never comfortable without her hat.’ Her work has come with her and she is beset with concerns about the shopping, the meals, the weather, and the dangers of cold sea water and hot sun. For her, the best part of the holiday is the evening when she is left alone with her glass of ‘medicinal’ port, one bottle carefully measured out to last the whole trip.

At the beginning of the book, there are hints that this might be the last family holiday: next year, Dick and Mary may branch out on their own. Part of the story also tells of the family’s loyalty to their landlady, Mrs Huggett, as her other ‘people’ abandon her. Will ‘Seaview’ even be open next year? Somehow, this fragile, ordinary, yet wonderful fortnight holds them all together for another year.

Where I’m from

A question I haven’t tackled in a while, but which Emily really made me think about.

I’m from a country slightly smaller than the state of Oregon. A country with a history so rich and thick it’s almost tangible, a history that I took for granted until I left it behind. There is a Neolithic settlement that was buried for thousands of years in sand and accidentally rediscovered in the mid-20th century; there is a Viking tomb, where at sunrise on Midsummer’s Day a ray of sunlight bounces off a stone one field away and lights up the entrance way. There are Roman villas, Norman churches and buildings from every period since and despite these architectural glories there are whole towns constructed from concrete. ‘Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough/It is not fit for humans now’.

I’m from the Black Country, a former industrial heartland that got its nickname from the smoke that shrouded it in the 19th century. I fled and lost my nationally despised accent, and moved around enough to recreate myself as someone who isn’t from anywhere in particular. So I’m also from Sheffield, built on seven hills like Rome. The people are dour but friendly, with a dry sense of humour and wicked self-mockery. It’s another industrial town, but I like brick buildings and half-broken windows and ruined factories gradually taken over by weeds. I sympathise with rusting ironwork, disused railway bridges and forgotten canals.

In the north of England you become attuned to the myriad subtle beauties of grey skies with their delicate opalescence of pearl and lilac. They are a foil for the open moors, where the clear air can take your breath away and the heather paints a thousand shades of autumn over the hills. The seaside isn’t where the beautiful people go to sunbathe, it’s where the ordinary people go to sit in their cars parked on rainswept promenades, to burn their mouths on Sarson’s-drenched chips that came wrapped in newspaper. The car will smell of grease and vinegar all the way home.

Then there’s Cornwall, King Arthur’s country, a place associated with childhood holidays. There’s a particular quality to the light in Cornwall so that artists congregate there. Barbara Hepworth had a studio in St Ives and some of her sculpture is in the garden of the cottage she owned. There’s a Tate St Ives where, on a clear summer’s day, the most remarkable image is the view of the coast, all blue and gold like the colours from a medieval painting.

I’m from a country where summer really does mean cricket on the green, the pleasing sound of a leather ball struck by a willow bat. I don’t even understand cricket, but it’s a marker of my year as are punting and Pimms, hot cross buns, the start of the football season and mince pies.

I’m from a whole different array of holidays: May Day, when we danced around a maypole and no one told us it was a fertility symbol; Pancake Day (Fat Tuesday), the only day of the year when we got pancakes and we could eat as many as we wanted for dinner; May Bank Holiday, when you knew summer had started; August Bank Holiday, when you knew it had ended and we still hadn’t had more than 3 consecutive days of sunshine; Bonfire Night, when the air smelt of smoke and we were allowed up late to watch fireworks and write our names in the air with sparklers and eat potatoes baked in foil in the bonfire. Lapsang Souchong tea tastes of Bonfire Night to me now.