Mick Hartley

Despite all the horrors we are, happily, in the middle of a what has so far been a glorious summer. Somehow, though, we manage not to notice, or at least not to celebrate. English summers only acquire their glory when they’re looked back on. At the time they’re sweaty and dusty, and we worry about drought and global warming, and everyone complains about how unbearable the tube is.

Elegies for past English summers are such a feature of our culture, more surprising when you think how rare and unpredictable the perfect summer day is here. Well no, maybe that should be less surprising: they stand out, while all the grim overcast days get forgotten. Everyone’s childhood summers are full of days at the beach, long July evenings, picnics….

Having spent some time yesterday waiting at a small suburban station, I can’t resist quoting this, one of my favourite first paragraphs from a novel, from Elizabeth Taylors’s “A Wreath of Roses“, published in 1949:

Afternoons seem unending on branch-line stations in England in summer time. The spiked shelter prints an unmoving shadow on the platform, geraniums blaze, whitewashed stones assault the eye. Such trains as come only add to the air of fantasy, to the idea of the scene being symbolic, or encountered at one level while suggesting another even more alienating.

Well, as my name-sake wrote in the opening paragraph of another book about a childhood summer remembered, the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. Mind you, I always thought that was a stupid quotation.