When The Sun Always Shone
Every generation delights in recalling the summers of their youth, says Alan Crosby
When we remember the summers we enjoyed as children, they were always warm and sunny. It never rained, there were no unseasonal cold spells, and everything was golden. Over the years I have looked at many dozens of autobiographies, recollections, diaries and journals, and so often there’s that nostalgic sense of happy times. My grandfather, who grew up in the Edwardian period in inner- city Manchester, never forgot a treat he had one magical Sunday. He was seven or eight, so it must have been 1904 or 1905.
A truly imaginative teacher, far ahead of her time, took her class on a day trip to the country – Grandad couldn’t remember where, but 75 years later he could still recall the tall trees, the grassy fields and the hedges full of flowers. Some of the children had never seen grass except in scruffy, weedy patches of waste ground. And none of them, Grandad included, had ever experienced the pièce de résistance of that wonderful afternoon – they visited a farm and watched the cows being milked (by hand, of course). Some of the more squeamish little ones vowed never to drink milk again!
For town- dwellers, nostalgia for the countryside in summer was a powerful emotion. Back in 1826 Benjamin Shaw, a mill mechanic living in an overcrowded street in the shadow of a cotton mill in Preston, wrote his autobiography. He was born in 1772 in Dentdale, on the borders of Yorkshire and Westmorland, and in his mid-50s, miserable, poor and with his wife dying of consumption, he looked back to his carefree youth in the Dales. There was hard work – “When I was 15½ years old my grand father bought me a Scyth, & I learned to maw.”
Benjamin went out with the men to mow the hay meadows: “At noons when the haymakers rested, I took a Can & went to gather Rassberries, or Strawberries, then got Some milk & Sugar on them instead of resting.” This rare treat was a delight. But all things come to an end, and when he was 17 years old in 1789 “this was the last Haytime that I went to work for them & I now found my Happines to consist of other things… I now found my mind desturbed with thoughts of the lasses.”
The innocent pleasures of those sunny summer days spent haymaking and eating wild fruit were pushed aside by more dangerous feelings!
George Sturt (1863–1927) was a wheelwright by trade and a writer by profession, who lived all his life in the country market town of Farnham in Surrey. In his memoir A Small Boy in the Sixties, published after his death, he remembered the high Victorian period when on hot summer days he and his older brother would explore what seemed the apparently limitless acres of Farnham Park, the grounds of the ancient castle. He recalled that “the shade of the tree clumps was delicious; sometimes we had an impromptu picnic there… Those were golden summer afternoons indeed.”
They looked out from the hillside across a vast expanse of countryside, across the woods and fields and white dusty roads. By the time George was writing this, after the First World War, things had changed out of all recognition, and the idyllic country town of his youth had a fringe of spreading suburbia, while motor cars drove through streets no longer white with dust but black with tarmac.
And were my summers always sunny? Of course! They comprised seaside holidays, playing in the garden, the swings in the park, damming streams, catching minnows with my fishing net, watching my dad play cricket, and the hot plastic smell of the economy- class seats in our turquoise Ford Anglia. No rain, no schoolwork, cloudless skies… it really was like that, wasn’t it?
Some of the children vowed never to drink milk again