Allison PEARSON

BRITISH SUMMER TIME BEGINS by Ysenda Maxtone Graham 352PP, LITTLE, BROWN, £18.99, EBOOK £10.99

It must have been the summer holidays of 1972 when I became the Headstand Champion of the World. There was no independent adjudication, but that didn’t dent the belief that I reigned supreme at the vertical feat I had perfected over six weeks in the far corner of the garden next to the guinea-pig hutch. I think the only audience was Susie the guinea pig (a boy, mysteriously) and, perhaps, my mother, coming out to call me in for tea. In my imagination, though, I was Olga Korbut who, that year, picked up four Olympic gold medals.

Was that the summer holidays when I devoured a whole shelf of Secret Sevens found in a cousin’s bedroom in Wales? Or when my sister and I got so wet caravanning in Cornwall that we sat in a launderette in our pants watching our clothes tumble dry? I’m not sure, but images of those long-lost vacations are as bright and invincible as they were when I first laid them down, almost half a century ago.

Into this resonant landscape of outdoor games and peeling shoulders comes Ysenda Maxtone Graham and her trusty notebook, head cocked, eyes bright with amusement, delighting in drawing out her interviewees who come from all sections of society. A Miss Marple of memory, she detects all the things that made us us. As she is at pains to point out, this is not a book about holidays, it’s about the summer holidays, “the vast stretch of untimetabled time that begins as soon as you emerge through the school gates on a July morning and goes on until the moment in September when you return, two shoe sizes larger and somehow changed”.

Did the summer holidays really change us? Maxtone Graham believes they did, and fundamentally so, in an era when children, like chickens, were free range and parents had no idea where you were. In those empty hours, youngsters “were building up imaginative capital to sustain them through life”.

In Maxtone Graham’s last book,

Terms and Conditions, an immortal portrait of girls’ boarding schools, the cut-off point was 1979, the dawn of the continental quilt. British Summer Time begins in 1930 and ends in 1980 with the arrival of the video game, when a predominantly outdoor existence moved indoors, and screens “began the work of putting an end to childhood summers as we knew them”.

Is this an elegy, then? Yes, but it is seldom mournful. Like Jane Austen, who also found a universe in small things, Maxtone Graham has a briskly comic spirit, whether she is musing on that fixture of Seventies’ gardens, the deflated space hopper (“perhaps the most optimistic name ever for a toy”), or on the simply dreadful food: “There was a surprising amount of meat on the pigs’ trotters. You knew they were cooked when the toenails came off.”

This was a Britain scarcely recognisable today with a lack of luxury that would dismay kids with their foreign trips and meals out. There was a “deeply ingrained habit of non-materialism among the middle and even upper classes”, as Maxtone Graham is surprised to discover. “Neglect doesn’t do it justice,” says author and broadcaster Rachel Johnson of her family’s hand-medowns summers on Exmoor. “We were hungry all the time. We desperately wanted our elder brother Boris to play with us, but he just said, “Let’s play reading.” The Johnson brood would beg their father Stanley to drive them to the sea, to which he replied, “Could easily.”

“Could easily meant no,” explains a rueful Rachel. “A Johnson can’t say no. Could easily is actually a firm ‘no’.” Might that explain why our Prime

Minister finds it more congenial to say yes? Could easily.

Almost every page of this glorious book triggers a Proustian rush of recollection. The beach where you “came back to the rug, blue-lipped, shivering, imploring to be allowed to get dry. The towels felt like sandpaper.” Woollen swimming costumes which, once wet, remained damp forever, or scratchy seersucker (mine was red). A world without satnav where getting lost was a part

Buckets of nostalgia: Blackpool in 1954 of the holiday, as was breaking down (“The words fan belt and carburettor were dispiritingly familiar”). Maxtone Graham is especially good on parents. “Rather unfairly, mothers were loved but often taken for granted… there was a mystique about fathers, they were above domesticity, in the way that a monarch is above politics.”

Her chapter on grandparents made me cry. “For many children, going to stay with the grandparents was the sole experience of Going Somewhere Else… their houses welcoming havens with their own distinctive sounds, scents and daily rituals.” Some “brought a vital layer of stability and reassurance to childhood,” although not all. In the Forties, says Caroline Cranbrook, “my grandmother, Constance Jarvis, used to eat our pets… We got back and Granny had eaten our rabbit. This happened two summers running.”

A child in 2020 would probably get counselling for that. By making us laugh at it, Maxtone Graham implies that it’s not heartless to suggest that such things were not damaging. Most of the childhoods in her book would now be considered risky to the point of a visit from social services, yet you end up feeling deeply nostalgic for an era that permitted such freedom. When children “made friends with the hidden alleyways of their mind”.

Lots of books have tried to capture the essence of the summer holidays. Maxtone Graham’s is the best. There are moments when the quality of her noticing allied to a deep sympathy for the men and women who lent her their younger selves achieves a rare poetry. Here she is on the horrors of the journey: “Nothing could alleviate the core problems; the dreadful suspension of the low-slung cars, the constant lurching on the winding, bumpy roads, the pervasive smell of petrol from the spare can, the stink of dog breath, the animal odour of the leather seats, the stench of old vomit from journeys past, the hard-boiledegg-and-banana smell coming from the picnic basket, and the poor interior design, which didn’t allow enough boot space or seating space, so offspring and soft luggage were wedged into each other in the back.”

Yes. Thank you. That’s exactly how it was.

‘We got back and Granny had eaten our rabbit. This happened two summers running’