Lost Summer

    "But oh! how I wish I still had* my very first book of all: written some time in the second half of the War: never submitted to a publisher, never even typed, never read by anybody in all the world except me.

    It was called Summer Something, or Something Summer. I have forgotten the exact name; but almost everything else about it I remember vividly and with a kind of bloom on the memory much like the bloom on the memory of first love. [...] it was a very simple and quiet story, tracing a few months in the life of Jane-Anne, aged eleven and sent to spend the summer with a strict Great Aunt in Exeter. She escapes from the chill correctitude of her aunt's household, to the warmth and refuge of the local doctor's bachelor establishment next door, where the doctor's ex-soldier son was slowly recovering from a wound received at Minden. [...] Looking back, I realise that the whole thing was heavily derivative, with strong overtones of Elizabeth Goudge, whom I had lately discovered, and a card party, given by Great Aunt, which, with its candles on the table and the monstrous nid-nodding shadows of mob caps on the parlour walls behind the players, was pure unadulterated Cranford.

    It was a story in which very little moved, except the slowly developing relationship between the young man and the little girl, each meeting the other's need in that particular period in their lives, against the setting of a big untidy garden flowering its way from Spring through Summer into early Autumn. I know every smallest thing about that garden still: the amber velvet bees booming in the lime tree, the flaming poppies with the soot-spill of blue-black pollen in their throats, the apple trees at the foot of the garden, just coming into blossom when Jane-Anne first entered it.

    There was a dog, of course: two in fact. One a flesh-and-blood dog, large and shaggy and kind; the other a china greyhound couchant and cross-pawed on the lid of a pale green trinket-box, Jane-Anne's most treasured possession, which she dropped down the well at the bottom of Great Aunt's very different garden, for a sacrifice [...]

    There was absolutely everything that I wanted to put into that story. I knew nothing about the self-discipline required in a writer. I scattered delights on every page, and found, in doing so, the same kind of escape, refuge, what you will, from a very lonely girlhood that I had accorded to my small heroine [...]"

    Rosemary Sutcliff, 'Lost Summer', from The Thorny Paradise: Writers on Writing for Children edited by Edward Blishen.

 

*The manuscript was first consigned to a drawer and then to a bonfire!

Comments

[Fran HB]

Fascinating that Rosemary Sutcliffe remembered so much of this first story, even though destroyed. Look what followed. Thank goodness she continued to write.

[Cornflower]

Yes, thank goodness! It is remarkable that it stayed in her memory to that degree. At the end of the essay she says, “Remembering it in as much detail as I do, I could probably re-write it now; make, as it were, a reconstruction. But it would not be the real thing. Perhaps you have to be twenty, and young for your age, to write that particular real thing."

[Dark Puss]

My only serious attempt at a non-fiction book (with a publishing contract) was confined to an A4 ring binder then to the recycling. About 60% complete probably, never worth the effort :-( I expect I still have all the computer files archived somewhere.

[Constance]

It sounds delightful, derivative or not. I must share with my mother who is also a big Sutcliff fan.