Summer in England
Grab your thermals
It’s freezing here in England. Brass monkeys. And not your American freezing either. Not minus ten, or negative ten, as the Yanks say. It’s colder than that. It’s in the fifties, north wind, glowering clouds, hailstones and rain, which feels infinitely colder because it ought, at the very least, be warm in June.
Yesterday I went to lunch at a neighbour’s. In June a woman likes to wear a summer dress. So I did. The good thing about thermal vests is they are invisible. Unlike tights. And boots would have made me look like half a farmer. So I wore sandals and bare legs.
We huddled in the conservatory and watched the clouds, livid and full. The neighbour’s daughter tried to herd us to a table in the garden. ‘Not bloody likely,’ I thought. Fortunately, the north wind blew a pot of hydrangeas over and soil spilled over the white tablecloth and that put paid to any ideas of going outside. Not sure why, but good old hydrangeas, you can’t beat them.
Just in case the daughter tried again, I slipped into the living room for my favourite pastime: nosing through another woman’s house. I found a large wood burner with a glittering line of orange, softly crackling and warming the room. I planted my bare legs in front and pretended to be absorbed in the family photographs on the wall.
They’re fascinating family photographs, aren’t they? Boring, but fascinating, those youthful, unlined faces that now droop with jowls and hooded eyelids. My neighbour’s aging warmed me immensely.
Talking of rain and cold, if we weren’t visiting the bombs and bullets of Belfast during my childhood summers, we were sampling the delights of camping in Great Britain. And just to remind you, Scotland and Wales are not the tropics. The sound of rain on canvas is a sound indelibly wired into my brain.
It’s no wonder my parents divorced. Three kids, a tent and the rain falling all day, every day. And I’m talking Celtic rain, the type of rain that descends like a mist and rises like a mist and saturates everything, even the bones beneath your skin. You thought skin was impervious, was waterproof? No, skin is porous, and bones ache when they get damp.
We had no heat in the tent, so to get warm, my sister and I ran down the field through the sopping grass to the shower block. After stripping in our cubicle, we pulled a cord and two minutes of warm water flooded over our shivering bodies. Some sadistic bastard had programmed the showers to not reset again for another ten minutes, so we couldn’t pull the cord for more warm water. We had to dry ourselves and slosh back through the grass, back to the tent and dive into our sleeping bags and hope our teeth would stop chattering soon.
My school friends used to go to Spain, and they returned with their skin toasted to a beautiful bronze. The closest I ever got to a suntan was when my mother got in a lather about England and English people. She swore so much her face got red and hot and if I stood close enough, I felt the heat from her cursing.
One time we camped at the foot of Ben Nevis in Scotland. A charming bubbling brook of a river turned into a torrent overnight and burst its banks and we had to take the tent down in the rain and my father got so wet my mother had to take his trousers to the laundrette to put in the dryer. He sat in the car in his underpants with the rain lashing the windscreen and us kids bickering and whining in the backseat.
(It’s no wonder I am drawn to Nietzsche and the Spanish Civil War. You can’t go through childhood holidays such as these and not come out warped.)
The sleeping bags got so wet we couldn’t use them, so we ended up doing bed-and-breakfast in a tiny cottage in the highlands. They only had one room, but we looked so bedraggled and stringy the owner took pity and allowed my brother and sister and me to sleep on the floor in our parents’ room.
The next morning we had a hot breakfast served around a proper table with proper chairs, not wobbly campings stools. The table was crammed with food: porridge and honey and bacon and eggs and toast and jam and tea and we could eat all we wanted.
It’s all to do with the bank holidays, of course, the rain. As every Brit knows, when there’s a bank holiday, there’s rain. We have two of them this year, run together, the 2nd and 3rd of June into the weekend for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. Monday, when we are all back at work, the sun will come out.
Back at the neighbours, I left the wood burner and returned to the conservatory. Rain was hammering the glass and there was no talk of the garden. After a lunch of salad, potatoes, and sausage rolls followed by strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and ice cream, I gave thanks that I am no longer ten or twenty or thirty or even forty years old and suffer no pangs or remorse when immediately finishing lunch, I thanked my neighbour and told her I had to go as I had an article to write. I thought that made me sound quite splendid. But she didn’t bat an eye and waved me off.
Once home, I ripped off my cotton dress and donned a thick warm pair of sweatpants, turned on the electric heater, and basked in its full throttle blast.
Who says the Sirocco doesn’t come to Croydon, South London?
