Liking to be beside the seaside
Matthew Dennison
THE FORTNIGHT IN SEPTEMBER by R. C. Sherriff Persephone Books, £10, pp.326, ISBN 1903155576 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. Its plot, too, is simple: a day-by-day account of two weeks’ holiday in which the days merge and the family’s perfect day consists of ‘morning cricket, with half an hour’s interval in the sea, a deliciously lazy afternoon, dozing ... then a peaceful ramble along the sands’. Into this framework, Sherriff introduces elements of small-scale tragedy. He does so with a completely assured touch, without sentiment, archness or coyness, lacing the novel with passages of pathos that are almost unbearably moving. The Stevenses are wholly believable and, as intended by their creator, wholly ordinary. But their goodness and decency — revealed consistently in little things — raise them to heroic status.
It would be easy, reading the novel now, to conclude that Sherriff — whose scriptwriting credits included the wartime film Mrs Miniver — intended The Fortnight in September as a work of propaganda, so admirable an Englishman is Mr Stevens, with his ‘deep sense of the past’, his loyalty, his feeling for the underdog (a role he himself has frequently been forced to accept), his love of family, home life and gardening. But Sherriff wrote his novel ten years too early. Its appeal to us now, as then, is of a less base sort. It remains a masterpiece — and one that surprises through its understated but irresistible power to move.
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