Gardens are past their best, large spiders are appearing indoors, chill mornings herald coming mists, the days are not so long, and adverts have replaced barbecues with ‘back to school’ offers. Elderberries have turned a purple that fades into black, and soon will drop and stain the ground. The daily commute remains relatively quiet for another few days but summer, and the summer holidays, are coming to an end.
For many of us, September feels more like a new year than January, long after our days of school and study. The cold days of January are much like each other; but at the end of August there is a palpable sense of change. Excitement and melancholy marry. Which one dominates probably depends on how happy you were at school or university.
Our childhoods are marked by summer holidays. They don’t have to be grand. I remember my parents leafing through catalogues of cheap hotels in Bournemouth, showing us the exciting possibilities, just as I remember us sitting in front of the TV in winter and watching travel programmes about package holidays. They pretended to be reviews, but they weren’t: they were dreams.
When our children were tiny our summers were spent in Cornwall, at a house by the railway line in Penzance. I remember reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula (my holiday reading is consistently ill-fitted) while walking along the beach with my daughter asleep in a papoose on my chest. Nearby my wife invigilated our toddler and his unquenchable study of shoreline life. Later years took us to Pembrokeshire – cheaper, less crowded, more beautiful.
Why do we go on holiday? The food, the drink, the glimpse of pike in Welsh lakes, the cicada-loud dusks of Mediterranean scrub, but most often for shared time, and a pause, as the poem praises, from habits and from chores:
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
We want to give children memories, and find that in doing so we give them to ourselves also. After Wales came Italy – not so much as our finances improved, since Italy was significantly cheaper, but because our children grew up enough to travel more easily and enjoy wider horizons. There was a sense of calm delight in being able to give them experiences we never had.
Some Spectator themes repeat themselves, like the seasons, and are no worse for that. So much of our mundane conversation does the same; we note changes in weather and light that are never original but always interesting. Life needn’t always be spent following the latest fashions and current affairs. Perhaps serious lives rarely are; the rhythms that bring summer and take it away again matter more. Riots and laws and politics are more the stuff of newspapers than the stuff of life. On a trip to Sardinia some years ago, I remember our first experience of snorkels and the endless delight they revealed beneath the sun-drenched waters of rocky coasts. For kids who hadn’t tired of Welsh rock pools, the richer world of the Mediterranean was captivating – as it was for us. What was in the news while we were there? I don’t recall even the headlines, nor feel their loss.
We want to give children memories, and find that in doing so we give them to ourselves also
This year, in Crete, in between reading Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor, I kept expecting my son to come through the water towards me, tumbling and diving for creatures below the surface. He was always as much at home beneath the waves as I was in a beachfront restaurant. If anything could have summoned him back to life it would have been the sea – or the lizards and cicadas and the praying mantids of our holiday home.
Fitting, at summer’s end, to anticipate old age, and to think of what memories may come. Keats’s ‘Ode to Autumn’ was as much about death as his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. Wordsworth spoke of keeping watch on man’s mortality, but it was Keats who saw his family die, and who worked the death-strewn wards of Guy’s Hospital.
Once I hoped to close my days being able to lean into my son and know again the scent of his hair, so familiar from his babyhood. But perhaps I can hope to remember him sparkling in the waves and the sunshine, and not feel the memory a mockery. Autumn brings the prospect of browsing Airbnb with my wife and daughter, and dreaming of next year; we were all kids once and Septembers still echo with the feeling of a new school year. If we are lucky, that makes us happy, and so, when a holiday ends, does returning home.
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