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LIFE-CHANGING SUMMERS

ARE WE nearly there yet? It is not just my kids who are impatient for their summer holiday to begin. In Scotland and Ireland, schools broke up weeks ago. The privately educated pupils we know are already whooping it up in Cornwall or the Med.

For my children, however, there is still today and a half-day tomorrow before, finally, school’s out.

I remember those long, listless sun-dappled weeks of school summer holidays, with such bittersweet fondness. They provided a glorious pause. Somewhere beyond the heat haze of the horizon, life would be out there waiting — to recommence, or even just to get going.

There would be results and decisions to be made and new paths to forge, but first there would be a long break of sunning, swimming and intoxicating friendship.

Riffing off Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, David Nicholls’s new novel, Sweet Sorrow, captures such a period perfectly. However, it is the mid-Nineties in Hampshire, not fair Verona.

Charlie Lewis has come to the end of school, after a devastating year. His future looks bleaker than that of most of his friends. But then he meets Fran — a girl who opens up whole new worlds to him — including am-dram. I laughed, I sighed, maybe even cried.

There is gentle restoration, too, in J.L. Carr’s moving 1980 novel A Month In The Country. In the summer of 1920, World War I veteran Tom Birkin arrives in the Yorkshire Dales to painstakingly unveil a prereformation church mural.

His marriage has ended and he is visibly damaged — scarred, he twitches and stammers — but the kindness of strangers and beauty of his surroundings become a balm.

It is the summer of 1923 that features so memorably in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.

Charles Ryder is in hell in London with his remote father. Then summons arrive from his friend Sebastian Flyte, who has broken a leg and demands a holiday companion. Brideshead, then Venice, beckon.

The nights are already closing in — make this a memorable summer.