Liking to be beside the seaside

This is the second time The Fortnight in September has been reviewed in The Spectator. On its first appearance, my predecessor applauded ‘more simple human goodness and understanding … than in anything I have read for years’. The year was 1931. Three-quarters of a century has passed, and what to that earlier reviewer was a study in contemporary ordinariness has become a period piece. But the passage of time and the disappearance of the novel’s mise-en-scène — the interwar world of seaside boarding houses — have not altered its impact. My own verdict and that published in these pages 75 years ago overlap entirely.

Mr and Mrs Stevens have three children, a cat and a canary. Mr Stevens is chief invoice clerk in a company of stationers. ‘He started as a handy boy — and that was the beginning and end’; he will rise no higher. Mrs Stevens has pale eyes and greying hair. Their daughter Mary is 20 and works as a seamstress for a King’s Road dressmaker. Dick, at 17, has also begun work for a stationers — unhappily in his case. Ten-year-old Ernie, named after his father, dreams of growing up to restock the chocolate-vending machines on railway platforms or to be leader of a military band. They live in Dulwich, in sight of the train line. ‘For twenty Septembers, wet and fine, hot and cold’ they have spent an annual fortnight by the sea — at Bognor Regis, in a boarding house, ‘Seaview’, belonging to Mr and Mrs Huggett (and latterly to the widowed Mrs Huggett alone). On one of these trips we accompany them.

The novel is simply written. In his autobiography, R. C. Sherriff claimed that, on completion, he considered it so simply written that he worried that its style might be better suited to a children’s book than a novel for adults.