Paradise lost
British Summer Time Begins: The School Summer Holidays 1930-1980 By Ysenda Maxtone Graham Little, Brown £18.99
This book has enough stories for a hundred novels.
It is a history of the school holidays from 1930 to 1980. Deprived of televisions and computers, the child could ‘vanish deeply into whatever it is: to lose track of time passing: to sit at the piano, or read through a whole adult library, or work out the guitar chords, or write a first novel on lined paper, or build something, or dam something, or play with a bat and ball, for days and weeks on end, so that time itself becomes the vast landscape he or she lives in’.
The effect of this emptiness was often magical: one woman related how, as a child, she befriended a tree. She was ‘willing inanimate objects to life’.
Maxtone Graham’s account is evocative because the author recorded the memories of only those she spoke to personally. An early chapter is so redolent of suburban boredom that, reading of a puddle of sunlight falling onto a carpet in Tunbridge Wells, I fell asleep in my chair. But I did grow up in Surrey.
The scope is astonishing: 50 years of holidays, for children from all classes, across the whole country. We get a young Dennis Skinner, buckling under his paper round, telling the newsagent that the tide had turned at Stalingrad. A girl hop-picking for the summer in Kent is thrown in the river by Ron and Reggie Kray, who blame each other. A boy at the River Clyde walks into a towing office to be told, ‘Tomorrow we’re taking an American aircraft carrier down the river. You can come, too. You might have to get the bus home.’ That would not happen now.
There are paradoxes, too: middle-class children were not often allowed to play outdoors and endured ‘punitive trips to the Shell Museum in Glandford [in Norfolk]’. Aristocratic and working-class children had more freedom: aristocrats because they had land, and the working class because they had nothing. ‘The fewer possessions worth stealing, the more the doors were open; so it was the poorest who were the freest. Towns and villages were porous, with children passing in and out of the boundaries.’
Adults did not tyrannise their children with their continual presence. We see a two-year-old girl sent out to buy sugar.
Mothers emerge as active, and soothing; fathers as controlling, with large amounts of PTSD after the war. They spent their leisure hours practising packing the car, to see how many tinned cans they could fit in, because even if they went to France they would not eat food they bought there; or they would photograph traffic jams. There are many stories of sympathy between child and grandparent: ‘because their houses weren’t our own, they combined the solace of the known with the unforgettableness of the strange’.
So here, in its scope, is a history of British children and what they did, and didn’t do. Although the darkness is there at the edges – flashers, lewd uncles, the woman beating an evacuee from neck to knee and cruelty from other children – it is unbearably touching, probably because it is tales of children; their vulnerability, their talents, their dreams. It recalls a shabbier, parochial England: cars always broke down; no one spent money, even the rich; road signs were removed during the war, and so everyone got lost. If you wanted to have a barbecue on the roof in Eaton Square, you would just punch a hole in the ceiling.
I thought of my own childhood,
of poking the River Mole with a stick, and holidays in Treyarnon Bay near Padstow, and jumping the waves with my father and climbing up cliffs as my mother lay in the sun. I benefited from the benign neglect that in the 1970s was still, just, fashionable. Today, my husband has to concentrate – to deny television, sugar and trash culture, almost hourly – to give our son anything like the same freedom and innocence.
At the end of the book, Maxtone Graham says she can’t see children spilling out of holes in hedges anywhere, as they once did. ‘I worry,’ said one interviewee, ‘that children in unhappy homes nowadays can’t get out.’ My most delighted childhood hours were spent roaming and alone, away from my parents’ shared misery – and so, at that, I wept.