Summer Nostalgia
A rose-tinted compendium - including 8 of the most summery books ever written. The end.
There is no season that makes me more nostalgic than summer. I look back at the summers of my childhood with Shirley Hughes-tinted glasses - when the holidays stretched into the distance, and the days were long with sunshine and daisy chains. My mother would throw open the back door in the morning with the invitation to play in the garden all day. There were picnics under the apple trees, dressing up as a bride with orange blossom tucked behind my ears, hiding in the sprawling raspberry canes, building dens behind the shed where plums fell from the tree above - luscious and plump, paddling pools (that invariably sprung a leak), adventures in handmade tents, pretend shops, evening cricket when my father came home from work as the shadows fell. Trips to the beach with egg sandwiches, Club biscuits, and striped towels, where we stumbled over the stones to the sea and swam until our teeth chattered.
Last week, on one of the year’s hottest days, I lolled in a chair in a friend’s garden in the deep leafy shade and I was momentarily, almost viscerally sixteen again, filled with desultory idleness and longing. It made my heart ache for the years gone - and for my younger self: so hopeful, so uncertain, so cluelessly wide-eyed. The summer holidays of my early teens were spent shuttling between village library and garden, where I sprawled on a blanket and devoured books as though the hours were running out. Later, the holidays were a time marked by the longing for something to happen - excitement, love, my life to begin? I didn’t know what, precisely, but something - and trips to the beach, returning sticky and flushed with sunscreen and sand. I grew up near the sea, and we would cycle to the shore in the evening - one of the boys would smuggle beer or cigarettes in his saddlebag - neither of which appealed to me, but building a small campfire and watching the sun slide below the horizon very much did.
I am compiling this year’s summer reading list for you, but this week I’ve come over all Proustian and bring you a highly rose-tinted list that wallows in nostalgia. Please do add your memories in the comments and we can all look back, misty-eyed, together. And of course, should you wish for further and regular missives from me, you can subscribe here.
The Greengage Summer - Rumer Godden
I first read Godden’s 1920s-set coming-of-age story in my teens, which is the perfect time to read it, but don’t let that stop you. When their mother is taken seriously ill whilst on a trip to France (marvellously, she has taken the children to show them the battlefields in order to curb the selfishness of the oldest girls), Cecil (our narrator) and her four siblings are delivered into the care of Eliot, a mysterious, charming, charismatic Englishman at Les Oeillets, a pension of faded grandeur and a run by sultry Madame Zizi. In the indolent heat of the days that follow, a mystery and all manner of those tempestuous, conflicting, incomprehensible teenage emotions unravel (envy, lust, longing). It is both deeply evocative of summer and a perfectly pitched portrait of that wild freedom of the last days of childhood.
“On and off, all that hot French August, we made ourselves ill from eating the greengages. Joss and I felt guilty; we were still at the age when we thought being greedy was a childish fault, and this gave our guilt a tinge of hopelessness, because, up to then, we had believed that, as we grew older, our faults would disappear, and none of them did.”
Sweet-peas. My father grew these in his vegetable patch - still does - alongside the runner beans and lettuce. They ramble and climb up and up to the sky. He nurtured the seedlings which are in my own garden, which I now pick every day in the cool of the evening - a riot of colour and the scent of summer. I am greedy: I hanker after a glut so I can gather armfuls and fragrance the whole house with their sweetness.
Suncream. The scent of certain brands catches at my heart - it is the scent of French summers. And now my children are growing - stretching into their loveliness, I think fondly of slathering their dear, chubby toddler limbs.
Tanned feet with the ghostly outline of sandals.
Summer Sisters - Judy Blume
Blume’s novel unfolds over the course of twenty summers. Every year, smart, shy wallflower Vix Leonard escapes her troubled home life for summer at Martha’s Vineyard, with hr friend Caitlin - beautiful, wealthy, not entirely happy. It is soaked in sunshine, tenderness, friendship, ‘hot island boys’, wild parties and tangled limbs and hearts. “You can live a lifetime in a summer, especially when you’re young.”
The sound of pigeons calling in the still of the evening, and the quiet chink of glasses and laughter.
Curtains drawn against the heat, moving in the quiet breeze.
Peas popped and eaten fresh from the pod and tomatoes plucked from the vine, ripe and sun-warmed.
Sweet Sorrow - David Nicholls
Few writers can make you sink into the landscape of the past like Nicholls, and here he captures the melancholy yearning of young love, without ever tipping over into mawkish sentimentality. In that aimless period between the end of exams and results, Charlie Lewis works in a garage, tries to alleviate his depressive father’s unhappiness and rides his bike around his nondescript town. On one of his rides, he happens across Fawley Manor – “a typical home counties mansion” owned by an ageing thespian couple who have invited their nephew, to put on a Shakespeare play in the grounds using local students as cast. Charlie “primed to fall in love” promptly does so - both with posh girl Fran Fisher and, eventually, Shakespeare.
Coca cola in bottles. I only ever drink this on holiday, so it is indelibly associated with summer, sand between my toes, and a sense of wild decadence.
The Go-Between - L.P. Hartley
An Edwardian summer heavy with class transgression, betrayal and desire seen through the eyes of a young boy for whom it a season of innocence lost. Marian Maudsley, a beautiful, free-spirited upper-class young woman, soon to be the viscount’s wife, is having an affair with one of her fiance’s tenant farmers, Ted (right out of Hardy novel, with 13-year-old Leo as their carrier pigeon. Leo - invited to stay by his friend Marcus, and middle-class to the Maudsleys upper class ways (this is a very English novel) - is innocent and longs to ingratiate himself, but his very innocence is to be culpable for the tragic outcome.
Sundresses with the thinnest of straps and a basket. In the spirit of what I can only call sunshine-induced optimism because I am no longer in my twenties nor do I live in the south of France and shop at a market, I have ordered this.
The Cazalet Chronicles - Elizabeth Jane Howard
Once upon a time, a woman (who I did not know) marched up to me and said she’d heard that I keep recommending “those Cazalet books” and wished that I would desist. “Nasty stuff” she sniffed.
I will not, madam. Yes, there is vast amount of bed-hopping and some close-to-the-bone stuff. (See also The Camomile Lawn, which my friend Helen - who sends me some of my favourite whatsapps ever - recently read and messaged: ‘Can’t help thinking that everyone’s being rather cavalier about Uncle Richard. He gets more flack for being boring than he does for touching up little girls!’) But Howard’s ability to give us both the grand sweep of history and zoom in on the intimate details that makes it LIVE is peerless. Rarely have I been so involved in a family that is not my own. My dream summer holiday might just involve France, a tower of baguettes, salted butter, a pool to dip into every now and then, and re-reading the entire series.
I could happily add The Shell Seekers to this pile. People can be sniffy about Rosamunde Pilcher but - once again - I think they are wrong and best ignored. (I appear to be very opinionated today). It is a perfectly wonderful novel about families and love and art and life, and when I first read it (I was a teenager and purloined my mother’s copy) I longed to be Penelope Keeling - tall, elegant, bohemian, insouciant. Incidentally, I think this cover is quite dreadful - really mawkish and twee. Bring back the original!
Eating in the garden with the lingering scent of the barbecue, the table a tangle of glasses, salads, sunglasses, sticky fingers, and linen napkins. (Try these.)
Weddings. Specifically the weddings of my childhood with the air of decadence and revelry: hiding under tables and running rogue and barefoot down corridors and around gardens in the warm night air as the grown-ups were, ahem, distracted.
If you want a summer wedding read - and why would you not? - ten lay your hands on Maggie Shipstead’s Seating Arrangements set over three days during the wedding week of Daphne, the elder daughter of the affluent Van Meter family at (but of coursee) the family holiday home on Waskeke, an island in New England. Shipstead elegantly unpacks her characters’ inner lives and it’s all very absorbing and brilliant. Rather like Mrs Dalloway, but with a longer timescale and a less depressing finale.
And if you haven’t already caved to my repeated insistence that you read The Wedding People then, what - may I ask - have you been doing with yourself? Alison Espach’s novel is deliciously witty, elegant, insightful and her characters live. One of those books you want to start all over again the moment you finish.
Washing blowing on the line. (Long term readers will know my feelings on this, but it is especially the case in summer, when it dries in minutes.)
Neopolitan ice cream. The only acceptable order into which to consume: chocolate, vanilla, strawberry.
Please do share both your memories, your nostalgic wallowings, and your favourite summer books below: I would so love to read them. And if you have enjoyed this, please do give it a heart or a share - not knowing how the algorithm works I cannot be sure, but I feel that every single one helps. Thank you, thank you.
Oh The Cazalets forever
I feel such bittersweet nostalgia looking at these Shirley Hughes illustrations - her artwork was part of the background of my childhood in the 80s. Loved this piece and will be checking out The Cazalets!