The Fortnight in September

"This is an intimate story. I don’t mean in a sexual way, but it’s very detailed and up close. RC Sherriff is best known for the play Journey ’ s End . He had fought in World War I, had been wounded at Ypres and wrote Journey’s End , which was an immediate success. After that his career had taken a bit of a plunge. But then he went on holiday with his mother to Bognor and suddenly the idea of The Fortnight in September came to him. It’s about a lower-middle-class family who go every year to Bognor Regis. They go to the same guesthouse, they stay with the same woman. And that’s the point of it. They just absolutely love it. It’s the story of repetition and ritual and absolutely nothing happens apart from the debate about whether they should hire a deck chair on the promenade and whether they should go to the concert on the pier or the grandstand and this sort of thing. It was a wild success. RC Sherriff was very reluctant to submit it to his publisher Victor Gollancz. He said it was like feeding a fruit drop to a lion. He thought it was trivial, and it is trivial, but he is the poet of the ordinary. It is deeply, deeply ordinary but gives a cunning, clever portrait of what mattered to people. It’s hugely about class, which is wonderful for social historians because it’s non-judgmental and is just a straight story. I think because it was a reflection of so many people’s lives. I don’t think it was because it was funny or ironic, though it is gently amusing. We all think that we want to read things that are different, but the newspaper columnists that you like are the ones that affirm what you already think. I think that in many ways this book affirmed an awful lot of people’s lives. What’s quite significant is that after this RC Sherriff would go on – like much grander people such as PG Wodehouse and Aldous Huxley – to Hollywood , because it was realised what a close observer’s eye he had and how he held English society in the palm of his hand. He went on to write the scripts for Goodbye, Mr Chips and other films. Then he came back and lived out his life in the town of Esher in Surrey."