ENGLAND WITHOUT AUGUST

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21248, 19 October 1940, Page 11 (Supplement)

ENGLAND WITHOUT AUGUST

NO HOLIDAYS AT SEASIDE :: BREAKS ARE NECESSARY

(By Ivor Brown)

QURS now is an anonymous world; we are bidden to be silent about nearly all that we see and hear, giving no military unit its name or place or nature; we move through a nameless country whose poetry of village titles may linger in the air and memory but is driven from its proper place upon the signpost. Edward Thomas’ rural England of “ Pyrgo, Roses and Lapwater ” must hide its melody, and if we are whirled across country in a train it is a land of similar stations all similarly shy about their nice, distinguishing labels. Something of the same kind has happened to our months. True they are allowed to retain their titles. But they all feel alike, apart from some minor differences of warmth and daylight. Thirty days there still may be, but their essence and their quality have gone. This, for example, may be August by the calendar, but it is nothing of the kind in fact and feeling. For August means having the children at home; it means seaside trains that seem half a mile long and are as full of smiles as of suitcases; it means Yorkshire at Old Trafford and Young Lancashire rambling on the Yorkshire moors; it means sand-castles instead of sand-bags on the beaches and pierrots instead of barbed wire and machineguns on the Marine Parade. August means Wakes and crowds and perspiration and fireworks on Regatta night, places lit up, and people too, the long twinkle of the pier and the strains of the “ Blue Danube ” fighting the chugchug of the arriving paddle-steamer which is always called The Duchess—and probably did tough service at Dunkirk. The Months Are No More August without hplidays and children rampant is no more the real August than is October its true self without mist and apples and crackling bonfires of garden rubbish and a sun going down like a blood-orange in the brief and hazy twilight after tea. That August has been lost for the time being. We shall not rest, and that is that. The months are no more: they are just fragments of time m the long burden of the year, drab units in the general monotony of plodding on. The case for having holidays in our lives is a general one. It Is medical and economic as well as hedonistic, and those arguments will have to be remembered as the War ., l^? V t s on . from stage t 0 E ‘age- Th e right time to sa Y }f° it ” may be difficult to assess, but thus to \ ary the übiquitous cry of “ Go to it ” is already becoming essential. But there is another excuse for holidays which is not often made. If one’s normal and workaday life is a bad and sad one they relieve it; if it is a good and pleasant one they make it appear longer. A year without breaks and vacations goes rushing by, and in ordinary times there are very few of us who want to see this whirling of Time’s chariot-wheels and to feel the cold draught which circles in that vehicle’s rear. Admittedly in war-time we may feel that a galloping Time is kinder than a laggard one. But in life as a whole we surely ask for that delay which enriches and prolongs experience. Change Puts the Brake On

Everybody knows how the first few days of a holiday seem like a month and how, when we have become accustomed to new things, the final weeks rattle by like petty days. So it is with life. The more one has of it the quicker it moves. The older one gets the faster must the years revolve and August follow August. In boyhood the summer term used to seem in May like an epoch or an aeon ahead of one. Then at last came August, and the long holiday did really seem to be long. Great gulfs of bliss lay between us and September. Why, sometimes one single summer afternoon would yawn before us like a void unfillable. “ What shall we do ? ” cries expectant youth. “ When can we manage ? How fit things in ? ” mutters busy, baffled age. The schoolboy’s hour is his senior’s second.

When we are settled to a job—and most people do have to stick to one job or kind of job. and that a steady, settled, unromantic kind, for the bulk of their lives—it is the use of leisure that gives variety and value to the years, stamps them with different marks in the memory, and prevents them from rushing by in a cavalcade of indistinguishable summers and dull, impersonal winters. It is not of necessity the sign of an idle temperament to say that the bread-winning business is not the most important part of life. Moving upwards in the office or profession brings growth of power and opportunity: one is able to work out one’s ideas in practice and to see what one’s old grumbles and grievances were really worth. That is good, but personality is developed quite as much in leisure as in labour, by the company one keeps, the books one reads, the custom of exercise, the pursuit of arts, the use of an observant eye, and the play of an imaginative mind. Travel Broadens the Mind There are always some men upon the peaks of prosperity who attribute their success to working 18 hours a day. Drudging of this kind may be one way to do it. But what drab lives they must lead—and also how brief ! For it is change alone that can mitigate that acceleration of time which advances with advance of years, and change of place is a great ally in combating time when there can be no change of occupation. To travel, they say, is to broaden the mind; it is also, in a very real sense, to lengthen the days. One day of new experience, fresh sights and strange company has the true time value of a week at the office, seeing the usual faces, holding the same palaver, dictating and signing the immutable letters. All this is not intended to prove the unreality of time and to inveigle the reader on metaphysical strolls up fourth-dimensional gardens. Enough of that has been written elsewhere. It is an incitement rather to those who are missing one August to use unashamedly such Augusts as may yet be theirs. By August is not meant a period of thirty-one days between July and September, but any time of altered living, new encounters, and escape. In war-time, admittedly, it may be good to miss holidays, because that makes time move faster and blinds our eyes to its content. Those who have “ gone to it ” most assiduously at the desk or the lathe and are staying there now have little or no chance to notice seed-time and springing and ripening. The days and weeks are all one to them: the months are a monotony, and 1940, so exquisite a year for those who have had eyes and liberty to see, has just been for the prisoners of duty a portion of time-stuff with calamity about and above and without character within. A Good Investment

Peace must restore our holidays not merely because we want a respite from drudgery but because we want to live again. And we cannot do that unless we can stop and shift position, take car and train and vessel and .jerk ourselves out of the rut in which the day seems barely to be two hours long. The holiday of which August is the national S3mibol and to which August is the national summons, be it long or short by the calendar, is a lengthener of life in essence. While the concert party is songfully announcing (and with an optimism which one hopes is to be justified) that there will always be an England, we may add that England will always have its August. Foreigners have mocked in the past our addiction to breaks and intervals, our long week-ends and summer vacations. By so doing they over-rate our sluggishness and under-rate our shrewdness. This August business has always been a good national investment. He who knows how to lay off and look about may sometimes, of course, be a master of the loafer’s craft; quite as often he is thrifty of time, one who would get eight days out of his week and be a master of the art of living.