British Summer Time Begins
Ysenda Maxtone Graham
Little, Brown £18.99
For those of us who were born before the arrival of smartphones and video games and all-day telly, this splendid book rings bells galore.
Take those interminably long car journeys to holiday destinations before the coming of the motorway, for instance. ‘Nothing could alleviate the core problems: the dreadful suspension of the low-slung cars, the constant lurching on the winding, bumpy roads, the pervasive smell of petrol from the spare can, the stink of dog breath, the animal odour of the leather seats, the stench of old vomit from journeys past, the hard-boiled-egg-and-banana smell coming from the picnic basket…’
When I heard that Ysenda Maxtone Graham had written a book about school holidays, I suspected that the subject was too broad. Wasn’t it a bit like writing a book about breathing?
Space Hoppers and ice cream, treats from a simpler age of summer holidays. Back then, there were no iPhones, no laptops, and television didn’t start until 4pm at the earliest. ‘Whatever you were doing,’ writes Maxtone Graham, ‘you did it interminably’
The lack of seat belts in the back of cars facilitated inter-sibling pinching and punching. The length and breadth of the country, crotchety fathers would chorus: ‘Will you children shut up and stop fighting?’ One of the author’s interviewees remembers his father stopping one such quarrel by saying: ‘Let’s see who can keep quiet the longest.’ The children then sat in fuming silence until his brother piped up: ‘I don’t care if I lose this game. You took the wrong turning 20 miles back.’
When I heard that Ysenda Maxtone Graham had written a book about school holidays, I suspected that the subject was too broad. Wasn’t it a bit like writing a book about breathing? But I had reckoned without her wonderful skill at finding the general in the particular, and the particular in the general.
She is very good on the anxious father behind the wheel, for instance, determined to set off at the crack of dawn in order to avoid the traffic. She heard of one such father who liked to do what he called a ‘dummy run’ the day before the big journey. ‘He packed the car to see how everything would fit in, then unpacked it in case someone drove off with the luggage in the night, and then repacked it at the crack of dawn on the morning of departure, using his now tried-and-tested storage technique.’
The book starts with those last few days at school, before the summer holidays begin. ‘No more Latin, no more French, no more sitting on the hard school bench,’ we used to chant at my boarding school. I always imagined we had made it up, but this book suggests it was widespread.
Similarly, common to all schoolchildren was the summer holidays’ sense of freedom, which came with the yawning possibility of boredom. ‘Time was suddenly handed to you in a vast chunk. What on earth were you going to do with it?’ Back then, there were no iPhones, no laptops, and television didn’t start until 4pm at the earliest. ‘Whatever you were doing,’ writes Maxtone Graham, ‘you did it interminably.’
The writer Giles Smith remembers life in Colchester being so boring that his father once went out into their front garden just to take photographs of a traffic jam. Maxtone Graham lists the retorts of mothers to children who cried: ‘I’m bored!’ They include ‘Go and do a puzzle’, ‘Go and tidy your room’ and ‘Go and clean your hairbrush’. Mothers in the East End of London were less forgiving. ‘Go outside and run your head along the railings – that’ll sort you out!’
But boredom has its advantages; Maxtone Graham regards it as a springboard for the imagination, forcing children to make their own entertainment. ‘In those empty hours, they were building up imaginative capital to sustain them through life.’
Some went high, others low. The young Rowan Williams, later to become Archbishop of Canterbury, borrowed a book a day from his local library, and then immersed himself in the complete operas of Wagner.
Speaking for myself, I remember spending long hours creating ever more ingenious traps for wasps. Forced by bad weather to stay inside, my brothers and I would look through the telephone book for people called ‘Smellie’, and ring them to ask them how old they were. ‘Are you by any chance farty-two?’ we would say, before howling with laughter and putting down the phone. Were these my first tentative steps towards becoming a critic?
In the hands of a less accomplished author, British Summer Time might have ended up a meaningless sprawl of unrelated anecdotes, but, with her beady eye, Maxtone Graham keeps things tight and purposeful
Maxtone Graham lists the retorts of mothers to children who cried: ‘I’m bored!’ They include ‘Go and do a puzzle’, ‘Go and tidy your room’ and ‘Go and clean your hairbrush’. Mothers in the East End of London were less forgiving. ‘Go outside and run your head along the railings – that’ll sort you out!’
Disgraceful behaviour, of course, but not as diabolical as some others. ‘My brother used to tie me and my sister down to the cattle grid – we were spreadeagled down there, waiting for the next oncoming car,’ recalls one woman.
A man remembers a playmate tying him to a tree in the garden and lighting a fire beneath his feet. In Orkney, they used to play a game called ‘knifey’, which involved throwing a knife between each other’s legs. In towns, ‘knock down ginger’ involved knocking on doors and running away. A more profitable version had the children running off with the milk money.
Brought up on a council estate near Stirling, Douglas Addison and his brother would catch pigeons in an old mill. ‘We climbed along the beams with a torch in our hand. If you shine a torch on a pigeon it won’t move. You just put it in a bag and wring its neck. We came back with a bag full of dead pigeons and our mum made pigeon pie.’
What emerges most strongly from Maxtone Graham’s hundreds of interviews is the lack of supervision. These days, anxious parents need to know where their children are, and what they are doing; back then, they left them to their own devices.
Jilly Cooper, brought up in Ilkley, remembers being allowed to ride on her pony all day, as long as she came back by 7pm. Another interviewee recalls how, as a little boy of eight, he followed a marching band on his bicycle from Chelsea to Buckingham Palace. ‘I got lost on the way back and asked a policeman. He didn’t take me home: he just pointed the way.’
Dennis Skinner, later to become an MP, remembers being left to play on the 300ft slag heaps in the mining town of Clay Cross, Derbyshire. Working-class doors were left open, with the children free to roam from house to house. ‘No one came in to steal anything because we all had the same, that is, nothing,’ says a Belfast Catholic.
There were toys and games, of course. Who can forget the Space Hopper, ‘a large balloon-shaped object designed to be sat on’ that ‘lifted you just a few inches off the ground before plummeting down under your weight plus the pull of the Earth’s remorseless gravity’? The witty Maxtone Graham suggests it was ‘perhaps the most optimistic name ever for a toy’. For boys of the 1970s, there was the awkward football game Subbuteo, with footballs that were, as Giles Smith says, ‘ludicrously out of scale, coming up to the players’ chins’.
Board games were always a standby. Designed to bring children together, Monopoly more often than not tore them apart, causing what Maxtone Graham calls ‘catastrophic family rifts… sibling against sibling, friend against friend. Someone was always stubbornly refusing to do the side-deal that would allow someone to complete their set’.
But jollier-looking board games proved infinitely more tedious. ‘The lid illustrations were misleadingly exciting – swarthy adventurers fighting off pirates, with a tag line such as “An exciting game of adventure against all the odds” – making the box’s actual contents (a folding board and some conical plastic protagonists) seem anticlimactic by comparison.’
In the hands of a less accomplished author, British Summer Time might have ended up a meaningless sprawl of unrelated anecdotes, but, with her beady eye, Maxtone Graham keeps things tight and purposeful.
The sweet aroma of nostalgia is never far away, even attaching itself to items – Chinese burns, pervy uncles, spam sandwiches, sunburn, flashers, carsickness – that no sane person would really wish revived.
Nevertheless, the book makes a good case for the greater freedom children enjoyed in days gone by. Life 50 years ago may have been more constricted, she argues, but ‘the simple fact of being at liberty to roam, and properly a part of your local neighbourhood – that was a true richness of life’. Today, you seldom see children playing unsupervised in woods, or going on bicycle rides, or playing football in the street. They are stuck indoors. ‘Home, which used to be a place to dream, to read, to invent, to play imaginary cricket matches with dice – has become a place of screen addiction.’ In this way, this perfect little book serves as both a celebration, and a lament.