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HEATWAVES
MY EARLIEST memories of England are of bleached fields, a heat haze shimmering off them. I was four in the summer of 1976 when my family drove south from our Aberdeen home to holiday in Wiltshire.
I was thinking of this last week when, aboard a sweltering train from London to Bath, I was surprised to see how green so many fields still were. Our little London garden is, after weeks without rain, scrubby and parched — the flowers drooping in thirsty fatigue.
In novels, heatwaves often usher in feverish abandonment. ‘I love England in a heatwave. It’s a different country. All the rules change,’ says Leon Tallis in Ian McEwan’s Atonement. His mother adds: ‘It was always the view of my parents, that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.’
Leon has come down one broiling 1935 day from London to his family’s Home Counties estate. There, his sister Cecilia has that same evening reached an understanding with Robbie Marshall, the Cambridgeeducated son of the family’s charlady — an understanding her overimaginative younger sister, Briony, misinterprets with cataclysmic results. Are the rules changed by this heatwave? The social status quo reasserts itself, but for Robbie and the Tallis family, that day comes to represent a rupture with the past.
A literal abandonment figures in Maggie O’Farrell’s Instructions For A Heatwave, set during the summer of 1976. Robert Riordan, the seemingly uncomplicated patriarch of a London-Irish clan, goes out to buy a paper, but does not return. The heat, which ‘inhabits the house like a guest’, is as keenly felt in this novel as his absence.
The natural world is rarely a place of safety in Thomas Hardy. In The Return Of The Native, Mrs Yeobright misguidedly sets off across Egdon Heath on a hot August day, with the purpose of being reconciled with her son: ‘Every valley was filled with air like that of a kiln.’
People still do reckless things in hot weather. But you hope a modern Mrs Yeobright would at least be wearing sunblock and carrying water.