The Fortnight in September. Questo articolo non è disponibile.The Fortnight in September

The Fortnight in September is by RC Sherriff, the author of Journey's End (1929). Set during the First World War, it had no women in it, no heroes and no love interest - it was about the hopes and fears of a group of ordinary men waiting in a dug-out for an attack to begin. It was based on Sherriff's own letters home, and its success was in part due to his ability to recreate the trench experience exactly as he had lived it. The Fortnight in September, written two years after Journey's End, shares its emphasis on real people leading real lives. But the atmosphere could not be more different, embodying as it does the kind of mundane normality the men in the dug-out longed for - domestic life at 22 Corunna Road in Dulwich, the train journey via Clapham Junction to the south coast, the two weeks living in lodgings and going to the beach every day. The family's only regret is leaving their garden where, we can imagine, because it is September the dahlias are at their fiery best: as they flash past in the train they get a glimpse of their back garden, where `a shaft of sunlight fell through the side passage and lit up the clump of white asters by the apple tree.' This was what the First World War ers longed for; this, he imagined, was what he was fighting for and would return to (as in fact Sherriff did). He had had the idea for his novel at Bognor Regis: watching the crowds go by, and wondering what their lives were like at home, he `began to feel the itch to take one of those families at random and build up an imaginary story of their annual holiday by the sea...I wanted to write about simple, uncomplicated people doing normal things.