I just loved this book. It's about an everyday suburban family taking their annual fortnight holiday. The time period is about 1920s. There is mum and dad, a teenage daughter who works at a dress makers, a teenage son who has just started at an office in the City and a younger son still at school.
The evening before a busy time of last minute preparation, don't we all relate to that. When they all come home from work and school, father's special list carried over from year to year refined and upgraded. His rituals before the household departs.
He always had an absurd pang of sorrow when he locked the tool shed door each year before going away ..
He thinks - The man on holiday becomes the man he might have been, the man he could have been, had things worked out a little differently ...
One gets further insight how things might have worked out differently for him.
A wonderful description of the train journey, through Clapham Junction, they have taken this journey each year for many years and know every changing of the box junctions.
At last they heard rumping of it as it came over the bridge just round the corner ...
Each year they go back to the same Guest House, ran by a widow and becoming a little more run down, but they are loyal and know that the board they pay is important to the land lady, even though many have left over the years.
I loved the insight into how sometimes one feels on holiday.
They had reached the strange, disturbing little moment that comes in every holiday; the moment when suddenly the tense excitement of the journey collapses and fizzles out, and you are left vaguely wondering what you are going to do, and how you are going to start. With a touch of panic you wonder whether the holiday, after all, is only a dull anti-climax to the journey...
One of the delightful passages in the book is the acquiring of a beach hut. Could they afford it? But it would be so very nice, and makes one feel well richer some how.
...that sudden pride that comes to cautious people when on rare occasions they boldly step beyond the ranks of those around them ...
It is said that Sherriff had in mind Bognor Regis when he wrote this book, but I could so easily see it applying to any number of link English seaside towns, equally well to link Southwold in Suffolk which I visited last year, especially with the Victorian Guest Houses and all those Beach Huts there.
Christy
The evening before a busy time of last minute preparation, don't we all relate to that. When they all come home from work and school, father's special list carried over from year to year refined and upgraded. His rituals before the household departs.
He always had an absurd pang of sorrow when he locked the tool shed door each year before going away ..
He thinks - The man on holiday becomes the man he might have been, the man he could have been, had things worked out a little differently ...
One gets further insight how things might have worked out differently for him.
A wonderful description of the train journey, through Clapham Junction, they have taken this journey each year for many years and know every changing of the box junctions.
At last they heard rumping of it as it came over the bridge just round the corner ...
Each year they go back to the same Guest House, ran by a widow and becoming a little more run down, but they are loyal and know that the board they pay is important to the land lady, even though many have left over the years.
I loved the insight into how sometimes one feels on holiday.
They had reached the strange, disturbing little moment that comes in every holiday; the moment when suddenly the tense excitement of the journey collapses and fizzles out, and you are left vaguely wondering what you are going to do, and how you are going to start. With a touch of panic you wonder whether the holiday, after all, is only a dull anti-climax to the journey...
One of the delightful passages in the book is the acquiring of a beach hut. Could they afford it? But it would be so very nice, and makes one feel well richer some how.
...that sudden pride that comes to cautious people when on rare occasions they boldly step beyond the ranks of those around them ...
It is said that Sherriff had in mind Bognor Regis when he wrote this book, but I could so easily see it applying to any number of link English seaside towns, equally well to link Southwold in Suffolk which I visited last year, especially with the Victorian Guest Houses and all those Beach Huts there.
Christy
I read the first couple of chapters of this and couldn't get into it but I was in the middle of reading M M Kaye's book "Golden Afternoon". I had ordered the RC Sheriff book some time before from the library but somebody else was waiting for it so it had to go back so will try again sometime.
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