Ysenda Maxtone Graham – British Summer Time Begins: The School Summer Holidays, 1930-1980 (Little, Brown, 2020)
I can’t decide if this book has come out at the perfect time, or the worst time imaginable. Either way, reading British Summer Time Begins in the summer of 2020 is quite an experience.
Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s new book is a study of the summer holidays. Not a holiday, she clarifies, but the holidays; the big gap between one school year and the next.
There might be a holiday somewhere in there – a trip to France, or more likely Butlins – but the abiding experience, Graham tells us, is of stasis. Not our current stasis, mind, but the open-front-door, gaggles of children, parents-having-no-idea-where-you-are kind of stasis.
No plans. No responsibilities. Just fun.
In researching the book, Graham interviewed a wide range of people. Most are working or middle class, offering nostalgias that most of us can share in, while the occasional unexpected story is provided by the ultra-wealthy and the poverty-stricken.
Even the widest chasm of class, Graham shows us, could be bridged by the spirit of the summer.
Both Dennis Skinner, son of an unemployed miner, and Malcom Innes, son of Lord Lyon King of Arms, share the memory of being booted out of the house every morning. Sent out without a penny and told to make their own fun, and not to come back before evening.
Of course, Skinner might have played on a slag heap, while Innes bothered the grouse, but the essential lesson here is the same. Children enjoyed an unprecedented level of freedom during mid-century summers, and had a distinct lack or toys and gadgets to fill their time with.
The summer gave children time to develop their own identity.
The school year was rigorously ordered and meticulously timetabled. Every action was accounted for. Only when school finished did children have time to muck about. And it’s during this mucking about when many discovered their talents; musical, sporting, or intellectual.
The book is wide-ranging in its scope and never dull. We learn about dreadful siblings, giant gangs of cousins, sacred grandparents and pervy uncles. We visit pebbly beaches, smelly caravans, the Scottish Highlands and Tenerife.
There are strange familial beliefs. The sea is warmer when it’s raining. Dragging a chain behind your car will cure car sickness. Swimming after eating will give you cramp.
I still believe the last of those.
Yes, this is a book of nostalgia. But if the nostalgia encourages parents to give their children a little more freedom, it will have served a good purpose. Our schools have bars on now, and summers are spent online. Every parent should read this book, I think, and remember what we’re losing.
– Joe Darlington
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