The Fortnight in September by R.C. Sherriff (Review)

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The Fortnight in September by R.C. Sherriff, published in 1931, is the one book you need to read in Summer 2023.

My copy has been hanging out in my office for several months while I decided if I should read it now or wait until September. After my appendectomy at the beginning of May, I found myself longing to read a physical copy of a vintage book. I needed the comfort of paper and the slower pace of the 20th century.

It was time to read The Fortnight in September.

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But first…what is a fortnight?

I love the word and I wish we used it more in the US. Help me bring it back!

Fortnight comes from an Old English term (fēowertīene niht) that means “fourteen nights.”

So a fortnight is two weeks.

What is The Fortnight in September about?

The Fortnight in September introduces readers to the Stevens family:

Mr. and Mrs. Stevens, 20-year-old Mary, 17-year-old Dick, and 9-year-old Ernie, on the night before they leave on their annual two-week holiday in Bognor Regis, a seaside resort town in West Sussex on the south coast of England.

Mr. and Mrs. Stevens spent their honeymoon at a bed-and-breakfast called Seaview. To Seaview the family has returned each September for the last two decades. As Seaview grows steadily shabbier, they debate going somewhere else, but their attachment to the landlady, Mrs. Huggett, and their own nostalgia keep them coming back.

The Fortnight in September is the story of this year’s visit. I’ve deduced that it takes place in 1930, as the book was published in 1931, and Bognor hadn’t earned the “Regis” (meaning “of the king”) until 1929.

I’ll let the author tell you about it.

I began to wonder whether I hadn’t been right off the track in all my previous attempts. I wanted to write about simple, uncomplicated people doing normal things…

The story was a simple one, so simple that I shouldn’t have had the face to use it if I’d been writing for anybody but myself. A small suburban family on their annual fortnight’s holiday at Bognor: man and wife, a grown-up daughter working for a dressmaker, a son just started in a London office, and a younger boy still at school. It was a day-by-day account of their holiday, from their last evening at home until the day they packed their bags for their return; how they came out of their shabby boarding house every morning and went down to the sea; how the father found hope for the future in his brief freedom from his humdrum work; how the children found romance and adventure; how the mother, scared of the sea, tried the make the others think she was enjoying it.

R.C. Sherriff. No Leading Lady, 1968. Excerpted in The Fortnight in September. 1931. Scribner, 2021.

That’s it. That’s the book. And it’s wonderful.

Who was R.C. Sherriff?

R.C. Sherriff (1896-1975) was an English author and playwright.

He is best known for his 1928 play Journey’s End, inspired by his time serving in France during World War I (1914-1918). (Not to be confused with Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford, on similar topics.)

The West End premier starred Laurence Olivier, to give you an idea of what a success it was for the author.

In 1932, he was recruited by Universal Pictures to work as a scriptwriter and spent twelve years in Hollywood. Goodbye, Mr. Chips earned him an Oscar nomination (with Claudine West and Eric Maschwitz) in 1940.

Sherriff had been seriously wounded at Ypres in 1917. He finished out his war providing lectures on gas warfare at Scottish Command in Glasgow.

Sherriff never shied away from writing about the war. Indeed, it brought him his greatest success.

So World War I is curiously absent from The Fortnight in September.

When was The Fortnight in September?

The text is adamant that the Stevens family has been coming to Bognor for two weeks every September for over twenty years. They have never missed a year.

It’s 1930. Mary is twenty, putting her birthday in 1910. Dick is seventeen, born in 1913. Ernie is nine, born in 1921. The age gap between the boys is the only evidence of the all-consuming Great War (1914-1918). The war is never once mentioned.

It’s not like the characters never think about the past. Much of what they do at Bognor is reflect on the past. We get a brief history of all of their lives from inside their heads. The war never comes into it.

Mr. Stevens would not have been exempt from military service on the basis of age or occupation. He’s in remarkably good health, even deep into middle age.

Even if the Stevens family was miraculously unaffected by the war, Bognor itself wasn’t. Two hundred servicemen were stationed on Bognor Pier. Bognor is on the south coast of England, susceptible to invasion. It’s likely they could hear artillery fire from the Western Front.

It’s not possible that their seaside holidays were unaffected by the war. As realistic and meticulously detailed as the book is, this is a world in which the Great War never happened.

Why is World War I missing?

Sherriff wrote The Fortnight in September while on holiday in Bognor himself.

One of the book’s major themes is time and the tricks it plays on our perception of reality. Time seems to speed up and slow down. Things that happened long ago can seem very near, while things that happened yesterday can feel a million years away. These things happen especially when we are out of our normal routine–away at the sea, for instance.

Maybe it only seems like they never missed a year. Maybe it’s a collective, silent, even unconscious agreement to pretend those lost years were never lost at all.

The whole family regards Bognor as a place of peace and safety.

As Mr. Stevens says on the final page, “It’s always all right at Seaview” (289).

Bognor Regis, George V, and Jane Austen

Besides featuring in The Fortnight in September, Bognor has had other brushes with fame.

A Royal Visit (or, Close Enough)

In 1929, King George V was advised to visit the seaside for recovery from surgery. He subsequently was asked to bestow “Regis” on the town, which is sort of a British version of “George Washington slept here.”

He actually stayed near Bognor, at an estate in the more upscale Aldwick.

Sherriff makes his view of Aldwick clear in his depiction of the day the Stevens have to spend admiring a nouveau riche businessman’s estate. This happens after Mr. Stevens runs into an important client of his firm and the whole family is unlucky enough to be invited for tea, forcing them to waste a day.

The Real Sanditon?

More interesting to me is the notion that Bognor was Jane Austen’s inspiration for Sanditon.

To be fair, a number of seaside towns claim that connection. Can you blame them?

As I read I couldn’t think quite what the book reminded me of–and then I realized it was Jane Austen.

Sherriff has the same gift Austen had of making everyday events profound through an understanding of human motivation and behavior so exacting it hurts. However, where Austen could be pretty snarky–and even downright cruel (I said what I said), Sherriff views his characters with a kind of clear-eyed kindness and empathy.

I don’t necessarily think that reflects a difference in privilege. As a queer man in a time when that could earn you a prison sentence, many elements of Sherriff’s life were as circumscribed as Austen’s. Perhaps it’s just a difference in personality.

Related: 23 Books to Celebrate Summer Holidays in the USA

Quotes from The Fortnight in September

I want to give you just a taste of this wonderful book.

The man on his holidays becomes the man he might have been, the man he could have been, had things worked out a little differently. All men are equal on their holidays: all are free to dream their castles without thought of expense, or skill of architect. Dreams based upon such delicate fabric must be nursed with reverence and held away from the crude light of tomorrow week.

R.C. Sherriff. The Fortnight in September. (1931). New York: Scribner, 2021, 18.

But over all lay a spirit of joyful, unrestrained freedom. There were no servants–no masters: no clerks–no managers–just men and women whose common profession was Holidaymaker. Round pegs resting sore places that had chafed against the sides of tight square holes–and pegs that had altered their shape, through softness or sheer willpower, so that they felt no aching places on their sides.

ibid., 111.

But he knew that time only moved evenly upon the hands of clocks: to men it can linger and almost stop dead, race on, leap chasms, and linger again. He knew, with a little sadness, that it always made up its distance in the end. Today it had traveled gropingly, like an engine in a fog, but now, with each passing hour of the holiday it would gather speed, and the days would flash by like little wayside stations. In a fortnight he would be sitting in this room on the last evening, thinking how the first night of the holiday seemed like yesterday…

ibid., 133

A holiday is like that. The first days linger almost endlessly. The sun, towards evening, settles itself in a hollow of the downs and stubbornly defies the night. Sunday–Monday–Tuesday: you feel you have been at the sea for weeks and weeks–

But gradually–time gathers speed. At night you sleep so soundly that you scarcely notice the darkness that flicks across to reveal the picture of another day. The hours go racing by–impossible to check–

ibid., 179.

It was good to have a home that called you: a home that made you feel a little unhappy when you went to sleep in a strange bed on the first night away–that lay restfully in the background of your holiday, then called you again when it was time to return.

ibid., 284.

How to Read The Fortnight In September

Despite its September setting, The Fortnight in September is a summer story, best read in summer, even better if you can read it outside.

While I normally have no prejudice against ebooks, I highly recommend a hard copy of this one, both for the gorgeous new cover and for the slower pace and immersive experience reading a paper book allows.

Read it if you’ve ever been to the beach/the shore/the seaside on vacation/holiday. Whatever you call your time away, The Fortnight in September will recall the feeling of long summer days where the ocean meets the land.

For me, it recalled my family’s beach vacations at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina in the 1980s, half a century and an ocean away from the Stevens, and yet the same.

If you want to spend time by the sea, The Fortnight in September will take you there.

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