BOOKS

"Do you remember when…" is how many of my conversations start with family and friends. Difficult and challenging issues may be raised but mostly they are stories that are amusing or nostalgic that are recalled to be shared and reminisced. Sometimes they are tales to be imparted, "I remember when…" I suppose such adventures can be had at work, but mostly they're when at play especially, but not exclusively, when on holiday, the long summer holiday, with new sights and sounds from being away or maybe just at home but exploring new territory and people.

In British Summer Time Begins, Ysenda Maxtone Graham has gathered together the anecdotes of over two hundred individuals, famous and relatively unknown, whom one can imagine sitting back in a favourite armchair, smiling inwardly, and composing a few lines in response to the question, "What did you get up to in the summer holidays when you were a child between 1930 and 1980?" Ask yourself that question. Are you smiling? I was and that's what made me buy this book; I wasn't disappointed.

It's not a ragtag and bobtail of a book as the stories have been woven together with Maxtone Graham's own observations in parts and then chapters. With scouting being present in many of the contributors' later formative years and beyond it is no surprise that it features or is alluded to several times. Under "Home, but nothing much planned," Maxtone Graham writes,

"I found it surprising, as a twenty-first century dweller in a city riddled with youth knife crime, that in Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons, as a reward for learning to swim, Roger's mother gives him 'a knife with a good big blade'. Knives were viewed as improving, wood-whittling or rope-cutting tools, something every boy should carry."

Under "Courses and Camps" one reads,

"For me, Scout camps were the real deal," said Alan Brown, who belonged to the 22nd Bradford East group in the late 1940s. "It was getting out into the country, up Wharfedale to Appletreewick, being out with your mates in the open air. Our Scoutmaster was great. He had two tin legs and went about in a cart - the mobility scooter of the time."

"Scout camps in Scotland were particularly bracing, the boys wearing kilts for a week."

Under "Reflections,"

"Because of the love of outdoors that I got from those camping trips," said Neil Herron, "I did a degree in geography at Newcastle University and my dissertation was on solute levels in Linedale in Teesside. I had one interview for Scholl Shoes but I didn't want an indoor job. I saw an ad for a labourer at Sunderland fish quay, and put it in my pocket so nobody else could apply. I did that job for twelve hours a day, six days a week, and then started a business as a market trader at Park Lane Market in Sunderland."

If anyone needs encouraging to take their scouts camping then this book, with sentiments such as the above, should more than help. In the meantime, if you can cast your mind back to an incident that happened in your school holidays and multiply by a few hundred then that is what you get in this book. It's a great read.

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Peter Donovan

British Summer Time Begins

Publisher: Abacus

ISBN: 978 1 4087 1056 2