The Fortnight in September by RC Sherriff

First published by Victor Gollancz 1931; this edition Persephone Books 2006

Why?

This was the last of my summer haul of books in the 'holiday genre', and I'd unwittingly saved the best until last.

RC Sherriff is better known as a playwright and screenwriter, most famously for Journey's End, so this gentle domestic novel is something of an oddity. But goodness, it works.

Enjoyment factor

I can honestly say that this is one of the most enjoyable novels I've ever read.

Published in 1931, the premise could hardly be more mundane: an ordinary suburban family from South London embark on their annual fortnight's holiday to Bognor, staying at the same seaside boarding house they've visited for years. They prepare for their departure, take the train, settle into their familiar routines, enjoy the beach and eventually return home. And that's about it.

Yet I was hanging on every word. It's utterly charming, brimming with warmth and extraordinarily perceptive about human nature. Sherriff somehow manages to make the smallest incidents feel momentous, without ever resorting to sentimentality or contrived drama. Most of all, it's gloriously uplifting. I was sorry to finish it and already feel myself missing the characters.

It left me thinking ...

This novel gripped me on two levels.

Firstly, as an exercise in microhistory. Sherriff's attention to the minutiae of everyday life is extraordinary, and reading it nearly a century after publication offers an anthropological insight into the habits, conventions and practicalities of life in interwar England.

Everything is recorded in granular detail: the clothes chosen for different occasions (if only men still put on a collar and tie to get on a train ...); the elaborate business of organising luggage and station porters in an age before widespread car ownership; the purchasing of railway tickets; the casual assumption that perfectly respectable people could simply throw their litter out of the train window (!); and the intricate social and domestic arrangements of a seaside boarding house. It all felt so familiar and yet so unknown.

But the second aspect is Sherriff's equally forensic examination of what makes us human. The family are deliberately unremarkable. They have modest ambitions, familiar anxieties, private disappointments and small hopes for the future. Each approaches the holiday with slightly different expectations, and Sherriff gives us intimate access to their thoughts without ever patronising them or belittling their concerns. There's something here for everyone to recognise.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that absolutely nothing out of the ordinary happens. On several occasions I found myself anticipating some dramatic development. A conversation, an encounter or an apparently inconsequential incident would arise which, in any other novel, would signal the beginning of a crisis or a major turning point.

But Sherriff resolutely refuses to oblige, and I quickly realised that my expectations needed recalibrating. Even after I'd accepted that there was never going to be a great revelation, tragedy or dramatic denouement, I found myself becoming completely absorbed in the family's tiny triumphs and disappointments. Things that would barely register in our frenetic twenty-first-century lives became genuinely exciting or upsetting. I was full invested in the smallest details.

That in itself is an extraordinary literary achievement. Sherriff doesn't need to manufacture drama because he's so adept at revealing the drama inherent in ordinary life. Nor does he need extraordinary characters, because his ordinary ones are so exquisitely observed.

It also made me wonder whether we've lost something in our relentless pursuit of novelty, excitement and experience. The family's holiday is so precious partly because it's so simple, and because they allow themselves to savour every aspect of it. The pleasure lies as much in anticipation and ritual as in the holiday itself.

Perhaps this is why the novel feels so uplifting. It's not that the world Sherriff describes is perfect, or that his characters are without worries and frustrations. It's that he shows how much happiness can be found in the unexceptional, provided we pay sufficient attention.

It's a while since I've mourned the end of a novel quite this much. I felt as though I'd been on holiday with the family myself, and was every bit as reluctant to return home.