(Taking a summer break from my usual fare, I’m straying into reviewing good popular history. Reading this book (which came out during lockdown) made me re-evaluate not only how I used my time as a child, but how I use it now. )
Ysenda Maxtone Graham, British Summer Time Begins: the school summer holidays 1930-1980 (London: Little, Brown 2020) .
Popping tar-bubbles on the road could consume hours, the bike you had access to was always either too big or too small, comics were currency, and everything happened outdoors. These are just a few of the memory lightbulbs lit for me by Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s perceptive, poignant and often hilarious book about the long school holidays in Britain, between 1930 (living memory), and 1980, which she designates a cut-off date before computer/electronic amusement and helicopter parenting. (Listening to the neighbourhood children playing loudly on the green outside, I think, with glad relief, that she has overstated the changes a bit, but that’s another story.) She is writing about Britain, but much of what she says applies to the suburban, lower-middle-class/skilled working-class Ireland I grew up in, in the 1960s-70s.
So how did children and young teenagers fill those long empty days? The answers to her questions are provided by extensive oral history interviews with a variety of people whose names are provided at the back of the book. Some of the people interviewed are well-known writers – Peter Stanford, Libby Purves, Valerie Grove, Juliet Gardiner, and others. But the experiences of unknown lower-middle-class, working-class, and rural people are included too – although she acknowledges that filling the hours was never a challenge for farm children, especially in the busy summer months.
The book shows that children and young teenagers were often bored in those long school-free days, but not necessarily discontented. Absence of school was enough to gladden the heart, and even solitary children in rural areas found plenty to occupy them. Everything happened outside the house. On the housing estate where I grew up, no child was ‘let out’ till all possible jobs (clearing up after breakfast, bed-making, hoovering, dusting) were done, usually around 10 or 11 in the morning. But from then on, apart from meals, we stayed out until dark, unless it was actually pouring rain. (How did we know mealtimes? We didn’t get watches till we were around 15. Hunger? The Angelus?) The children in Maxtone Graham’s book ( like us), played anywhere and everywhere – on streets, roads and in fields, on slag-heaps and building-sites (and of course the older ones in her book played on bomb-sites). Old prams were refashioned into go-karts to go down hills at speed. Treehouses or other constructions – always precariously built by children themselves – were, variously, ‘houses’, forts, ships, prisons. We made really good forts out of the triangular piles of planks on a nearby building-site. How we got away with it I don’t know. On very wet days, space in somebody’s house was sometimes grudgingly conceded for quarrelsome card games and interminable board games. But there were no playrooms(not even for the better-off children Maxtone Graham interviewed), and bedrooms were completely out of bounds.
Perfectly useless skills were honed. When, as an adult, does one need to do any of the following: ride a bike hands-free, walk a narrow concrete beam 20 ft off the ground, spring a surprise attack on an unsuspecting ‘fort’, clap hands three times quickly – tummy-back-tummy – in the space of time a ball is bouncing off a wall? Or, for that matter, win at Snap or Snakes and Ladders? Yet these were all time-consuming pastimes, as were climbing trees, making up languages, drawing elaborate pictures on any kind of paper that could be spared (usually brown paper bags from ‘the messages’), going for long, aimless cycles, and (my favourites) reading, and then filling copybooks with long derivative stories.
And then there were the holidays proper, the going-away times, if you were lucky enough. Most people interviewed by Maxtone Graham went somewhere; one boy remembered his grandparents’ flat in Glasgow’s Gorbals as a magical place, for another boy a taste of the exotic was his grandmother’s holy-picture-filled, two-up-two-down terraced house in Mullingar. For lower-middle-class/skilled working class families, the usual holiday destination was the damp, rented house in the West Country or East Anglia, or, for hardier souls, the northerly coasts where the weather was usually blustery and bracing, and the sea freezing. (We used to go for a week or two anywhere on the south or west coast of Ireland, to holiday houses that were nearly always the owners’ sean-teach – cookers were on gas, bedrooms were pannelled in wood and bathrooms, built onto the end of the house, were always painted bright blue. But one year we actually stayed in a converted railway carriage.) Maxtone Graham found it hard to find out who exactly went to Butlins and similar camps; for some they were far too expensive, others were a bit ‘above’ them. But in one camp, she tells us, an emergency call for medical assistance was answered by 27 holidaying doctors. So there was a social mix.What people remembered most vividly, though, was the sense of hope and release when the over-loaded car started on that slow holiday journey, or when the whistle blew and the green flag waved and the train set off to loud cheers, as it did for factory-working holidaymakers taking themselves from Bradford to Blackpool for the first two weeks of August. I don’t know why reading that bit brought tears to my eyes, but it did.
The core of this book, though, is the holidays-at-home. Those useless skills we perfected – making seesaws from barrels and planks, walking walls, catching balls, building and foraging – taught us patience and application, fired our imaginations, and allowed us to discover what we enjoyed doing and what we were good (and bad) at. Maxtone Graham advises any middle-aged and older people who cannot seem to find an enjoyable pastime, to remember what absorbed and intrigued them at age 10 or 11; the chances are that whatever it was, or an approximation of it, will still absorb and intrigue them now.
And I don’t want to be one of those reviewers who write an article on the topic being reviewed without emphasising how good the actual book is. This book manages to be funny, delightful and seriously philosophical, too. Ysenda Maxtone Graham is the grand-daughter of another witty and wise everyday-philosopher, Jan Struther (1901-53), who wrote Try Anything Twice (1938) and Mrs Miniver (1939). As they say in Connacht: ‘where would she (Maxtone Graham) leave it.’
HOLIDAY READING.
Lisa Jewell, Don’t Let Him In ( Century 2025). Not so much a Whodunnit as a Will-he get-away-with-it, this is a page-turner. There is also a great sense of place in it, and some strong sub-plots and believable characters. So many modern thrillers,even if well-plotted, have entire chapters telling us what we know already, with bald dialogue. Miss a page of this and you miss something important. The revelations come gradually and they aren’t all about the main villain, either. I was going to give this away to the charity shop but I think I’ll hold on to it – it’s so well- written I’ll enjoy it again in a few years.
CLEAR CLASSICS: Every week I write about books which either are classics, or which should be classics, or which some people believe are classics, with an emphasis on the first three-fifths of the twentieth century. Women writers predominate (but not entirely) and religion has reared its head more than once. This is as much a journey of discovery for me as it is for those kind people who read this blog.
Clear Classic Books 
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