The Fortnight in September
The constant undertow of R.C. Sherriff’s 1931 novel The Fortnight in September is time. The two significant words in the title are about time, and it colours everything that follows, but this is not a melancholic story. One of the impressive things is how delicately Sherriff balances the awareness of time, its degradations and disappointments, and the consolations of family togetherness and kindness. There would be a fascinating discussion of Vision and Viewpoint here (for those used to the Leaving Certificate).
Today Sherriff is overwhelmingly known for his Great War play, Journey’s End, but beyond that was a fascinating life and impressive achievements: he was the screenwriter for the films Goodbye Mr Chips and The Dam Busters, and several novels, including his counter-factual The Hopkins Manuscript, which I read last year (nothing to do with Gerard Manley … the moon crashes into the earth).
The premise of The Fortnight in September is very modest: a lower middle-class family prepares to go on its annual holiday to Bognor Regis, and then the largely eventless holiday takes place. Behind this plainness is rich texture, and of course most of us live most of our lives without any great ‘events’. Sherriff is tender with and about his characters, never patronising them. Mr and Mrs Stevens (always those titles, never their first names) and their children Dick, Mary and Ernie come to life vividly in turn (the main lens through which we see being the father). That tenderness extends to the landlady of the fading guest house in Bognor they use religiously, Mrs Huggett, whose own life is quietly suffering from time’s geologically slow cruelty. There is something of William Trevor in the clarity of the writing and the author’s empathy with limited lives.
There are 100 pages before the family arrive in Bognor (by train, including the terrifying challenges of Clapham Junction). This might remind a teacher of one of those school essays about a trip, but in fact those pages are essential: they convey the excitements of preparation, but also how careful this deep-rooted annual routine is, and how much it reveals the way they think. Mr Stevens has put together a document called ‘Marching Orders’, a checklist they use each year to make sure everything is in order before the leave. Routines protect them. Not too far away is the possibility of their lives going awry, as we see with Mrs Huggett. Mr Stevens has had his own disappointments in life, but they have not been disastrous. He is determined to do the best for his family. His timid wife is more thin-skinned, frightened by the sea, as she is by much of the world:
She had never conquered her fear. It frightened her most when it was dead calm. Something within her shuddered at the great smooth, slimy surface, stretching into a nothingness that made her giddy. For their honeymoon they had taken apartments with Mr and Mrs Huggett in St Matthew’s Road - called ‘Seaview,’ because from the lavatory window you could see the top of a lamp post on the front.
The book is fascinatingly poised in 1931, just 13 years after the war in which Sherriff fought and which provided the story for Journey’s End. Yet that war is absent here. Sherriff understandably found being under shellfire extremely distressing and at the end of 1916 was sent off sick with ‘neuralgia’. He had clearly been traumatised. Eventually he was sent back to England to train troops. You can guess none of this from the novel, but knowing it is moving. Was Sherriff writing as ordinary a narrative as possible in reaction to his experience in war? It is also moving to think that this carefully-ordered, just-controlled world would explode into pieces 8 years after publication.
In one of the simultaneously trivial and terribly important ‘events’, the family agonise over renting a better bathing hut than they normally take. It is called ‘The Cuddy’ and has a balcony. Truly, ‘luxury’. The pages about the decision on whether or not to take this hut are a marvel of eddying minute tensions. Then Dick breaks the ice and says they should go for it.
Their heads were higher as they walked to the office beyond the pier. They felt that sudden excited happiness - that sudden pride that comes to cautious people when on rare occasions they boldly step beyond the ranks of those round them. They no longer viewed the passing holiday makers with shyness and envy: their decision had suddenly raised them far beyond their mass, and they looked with pity and a trace of contempt at a fat, bald man who emerged from a small, common, cheap little hut without a balcony.
The little drama is not over. There is a problem, and they think they will not get the hut. Disappointment. Then they do, a little late, and,
It could not possibly have worked out better: they would not only save five shillings, but they would enjoy the hut much more through having to wait for it. It was theirs now, to all intents and purposes: they would stroll by and look at it tomorrow: they would picture themselves grouped round it - sitting on the balcony, hanging their bathing dresses over the rails - and then on Tuesday night they would unlock the door and go in: they would sit just inside the look out over the moonlit sea, and the soft music of the band would come to them faintly on the wind.
There are more little dramas to come, but this is the core of it all: ordinary people in an ordinary family, not condescended about or mocked: their togetherness, their resilience, as they make their way through life and try to make the most of the time they have.
[I read the novel in the lovely Persephone Books edition: a pleasure in itself]
September 2021: an abridged version was on Radio 4, marvellously read by Adrian Scarborough.
Andy Miller of Backlisted was a guest on the Sentimental Garbage podcast to discuss the book with Caroline O’Donoghue.