11/365: The Fortnight in September by R.C. Sherriff

The Fortnight in September by R.C. Sherriff Rating: ★★★★½ Publication Date: September 1, 1931 Genre: fiction Pages: 304 ReRead?: No Project: 2024 read my hoard, Project 365 The Fortnight in September embodies the kind of mundane normality the men in the dug-out longed for – domestic life at 22 Corunna Road in Dulwich, the train journey via Clapham Junction to the south coast, the two weeks living in lodgings and going to the beach every day. The family’s only regret is leaving their garden where, we can imagine, because it is September the dahlias are at their fiery best: as they flash past in the train they get a glimpse of their back garden, where ‘a shaft of sunlight fell through the side passage and lit up the clump of white asters by the apple tree.’ This was what the First World War soldiers longed for; this, he imagined, was what he was fighting for and would return to (as in fact Sherriff did). He had had the idea for his novel at Bognor Regis: watching the crowds go by, and wondering what their lives were like at home, he ‘began to feel the itch to take one of those families at random and build up an imaginary story of their annual holiday by the sea...I wanted to write about simple, uncomplicated people doing normal things.’

A near perfect novel, The Fortnight in September is the charming, and deceptively simple, story of the Stevens family and their yearly holiday taken at the seaside in Bognor Regis, Sussex. Mr. Stevens, his wife (Flossie) and their children have been taking their holiday at the Seaview, a boarding house run by Mrs. Huggett, for the previous 20 years. The two older children, Dick and Mary, are actually young adults at this point. They have both left school and started working, Mary at a dressmakers and Dick at a stationer. The youngest child, Ernie, is ten and remains a bit of a cipher through the entire book.

Everyone else gets their moment of focus during the fortnight that they are at the Seaside. The book opens with everyone packing and checking off their leaving chores, and takes us – in detail – through the railway journey (change trains in Clapham, with only 14 minutes to spare), and then to Bognor Regis and the Seaview.

This year, the year described, is particularly bittersweet. The Stevens are a close family, but it is clear that both Dick and Mary are realizing that these family holidays are coming to an end. The Seaview itself has become a bit rundown and Mrs. Huggett herself isn’t doing so well as before. They are fiercely loyal, but even so, if this isn’t the final family holiday at the Seaview, it’s undeniable, even if a bit painful, that this time of their life is grinding slowly to a halt.

As an empty nester, there’s something very universal in The Fortnight in September. My family vacations – in the U.S., we rarely use the word “holiday” for anything other than a specific day like Christmas or Labor Day – were quite different from the one described in the novel, but, nonetheless, the feeling is so similar. The way that a family creates traditions for itself, that are worth repeating simply because that’s what your family has always done. The way that a vacation seems like a whole separate world. When my daughter went away to college, and then my son graduated from high school, one of the most painful things was knowing that the family vacation would never be the same.

Kazuo Ishiguro provides the blurb on the cover of my edition: “Uplifting, life-affirming . . . the beautiful dignity to be found in everyday living has rarely been captured so delicately.”

And, yes, I agree with this to my bones. There is something about a simple family and a simple life that is deeply moving. Mr. and Mrs. Stevens are a very ordinary husband and wife, and they do have yearnings, but, at the same time, they are content with the life that they have built. Proud, even, of what they have accomplished. They have done well.

Mr. Stevens has not achieved everything he would have hoped to achieve as a young man, but he has bought a house (that will be his, outright, in twelve more payments), and he has a wife and he is proud of his children. And Mrs. Stevens, well, she doesn’t even like the seaside, it frightens her, but for two decades she has put her family first and made carefully sure that they never know how she really feels. She has given them this as a gift.

The book ends when the holiday ends, when the Stevens are packed and ready to go back to the station for the journey home. I was so sorry to see it end – I would love to have read more about their lives. What happened to Mary? Did Dick find a better job for himself, as he wanted? How did Mr. Stevens’s return to work go? Had he forgotten the invoice that gave him anxiety during the holiday? Did they ever return to the Seaview?

This book may be the perfect antidote to our current culture of individualism and the obsession with chasing wealth. I’m so glad I read it. I will read it again.