Lost Summer (1975)
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sutcliff_spaceAn essay of 1500 words describing a piece of Sutcliff's juvenilia which sounds quite charming, from the anthology The Thorny Paradise: Writers on Writing for Children, edited by Edward Blishen, which you can read here at Internet Archive. She later mentioned this early story in her 1983 memoir Blue Remembered Hills, with some slightly different details as you can see here. The essay also discusses some trade-offs of inexperience and experience as a writer – I'd love to know if the writers here agree.
LOST SUMMER
One of our foremost writers (it might have been George Bernard Shaw, but I don’t think it was) once said that he disliked writing only one degree less than he disliked not writing. That, of course, is an overstatement, but I suspect that there’s a hideous grain of truth in it.
Writing is too much like gruellingly hard work, even though it is work one loves.
I suppose most writers know the joy once, perhaps twice, in their whole working life, of a book which almost creates itself, ‘as a bird sings’. Only the very fortunate know it more than twice. The first time comes, almost always, and for obvious reasons, with the first book. We plunge into it so light-heartedly, so eagerly. We have not the remotest idea of the sheer hard work, the problems and difficulties and heartbreaks involved in creative writing; and so the book is a delight. Quite often it is slightly illicit, being written in time snatched from other things that we really ought to be doing instead, such as our proper jobs, or sleeping, or healthy exercise; and this, of course, gives an added joy to the enterprise. The second book, supposing that the first has found a publisher, is a very different matter, written with a good deal of anxiety as to whether we can ‘do it again’. If we get past that, there may be another book, somewhere among the next four or so, that will come in the same almost magical way as the first. But it’s only the truly blessed among us, or those who have the luck of Old Nick, who find the joy of such a book again, after our list of titles has reached five or six. By that time we are too well aware of the strains and stresses, the problems, the dark patches when nothing will come, and the fear that nothing will ever come again. We still love writing, it’s the breath of life to us, even on the days when nothing comes right and we think how nice it would be to be a bus conductor or stockbroker or old man’s darling and never have to write another word. Speaking personally, if for some reason I am unable to write for awhile I develop spiritual constipation. But as the years go by, I become more and more of a perfectionist, and spend more and more time sitting and staring at a blank page and wondering exactly how to put down the thing that I am trying to say, instead of happily scribbling whatever comes into my head, with the proviso that if it isn’t right, I can always go over it again later and make all well.
For me, there have been two, among my published books, written with this effortless delight. The first was The Queen Elizabeth Story. I had already written The Chronicles of Robin Hood, but that was a re-telling, an adopted child, while the Q.E.S. was the first book born out of my own being. The other was The Eagle of the Ninth. I hope and think that I have written better books since; but Eagle, with this quality of specialness, of delight, of coming as a bird sings, remains my best-beloved among my own books, and – presumably something of all this passes through the writing, to reach out to the reader on the far side – it still seems to be the most generally popular with children, too.
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 but 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. In writing it, I don’t think I ever stopped to wonder whether it was supposed to be for adults or children; it was just the story I wanted to write, the book of my heart. It was set in the eighteenth century, which was odd, because I have always claimed that I can’t handle anything later than the Civil War: that if I try, it turns to Cloak-and-Dagger on me. This was certainly not Cloak-and-Dagger; it was a very simple and quiet story, tracing a few months in the life of Jane-Anne, aged eleven and sent, while her mother recovered from a miscarriage, 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. (Yes, of course, if there seems anything familiar about this, a good deal of it found its way years later, or sixteen hundred years earlier, whichever way you like to look at it, into the Summer which Marcus spent convalescing with Uncle Aquila, in The Eagle of the Ninth. Even the rescue operation carried out, under protest, by the older man, even the second probing of the young man’s wound.) Looking back, I realize 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, with its candles on the table and the monstrous nod-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, to reinforce her prayers that God would ‘Make It All Right’ for Hugh, undergoing that second probing of the wound.
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 (I must have been about twenty, but I think I was young for my age) that I had accorded to my small heroine.
And in the end it got out of hand and went wrong, because I had not the experience, either of life or of writing, to know that it was an idyll, a Summer fragment that reached its natural end when, with the apples ripening on the trees at the bottom of the garden, Jane-Anne departed back to her family and Hugh set off to walk the wards of a big London hospital and train to be a doctor like his father. I tried to carry on through a second half that refused to come to life, to a conventional Happy Ever After ending that had no true place in the story. And because it would not work out, I thought simply that it was destined to remain unfinished – and put it away in a drawer, but never forgot about it.
Later, echoes of it, lingering around my mind, found their way into other books, notably into that Summer in The Eagle of the Ninth. Later still, when my father and I moved from Devon to Sussex, I found the old manuscript, and consigned it, along with quite a few other things that I have since regretted, to the bonfire.
I wish so much I had not. It was the first story I ever wrote, and despite all its faults, I began learning my trade in the writing of it; and no book since has ever given me quite the joy that it gave me.
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.
LOST SUMMER
One of our foremost writers (it might have been George Bernard Shaw, but I don’t think it was) once said that he disliked writing only one degree less than he disliked not writing. That, of course, is an overstatement, but I suspect that there’s a hideous grain of truth in it.
Writing is too much like gruellingly hard work, even though it is work one loves.
I suppose most writers know the joy once, perhaps twice, in their whole working life, of a book which almost creates itself, ‘as a bird sings’. Only the very fortunate know it more than twice. The first time comes, almost always, and for obvious reasons, with the first book. We plunge into it so light-heartedly, so eagerly. We have not the remotest idea of the sheer hard work, the problems and difficulties and heartbreaks involved in creative writing; and so the book is a delight. Quite often it is slightly illicit, being written in time snatched from other things that we really ought to be doing instead, such as our proper jobs, or sleeping, or healthy exercise; and this, of course, gives an added joy to the enterprise. The second book, supposing that the first has found a publisher, is a very different matter, written with a good deal of anxiety as to whether we can ‘do it again’. If we get past that, there may be another book, somewhere among the next four or so, that will come in the same almost magical way as the first. But it’s only the truly blessed among us, or those who have the luck of Old Nick, who find the joy of such a book again, after our list of titles has reached five or six. By that time we are too well aware of the strains and stresses, the problems, the dark patches when nothing will come, and the fear that nothing will ever come again. We still love writing, it’s the breath of life to us, even on the days when nothing comes right and we think how nice it would be to be a bus conductor or stockbroker or old man’s darling and never have to write another word. Speaking personally, if for some reason I am unable to write for awhile I develop spiritual constipation. But as the years go by, I become more and more of a perfectionist, and spend more and more time sitting and staring at a blank page and wondering exactly how to put down the thing that I am trying to say, instead of happily scribbling whatever comes into my head, with the proviso that if it isn’t right, I can always go over it again later and make all well.
For me, there have been two, among my published books, written with this effortless delight. The first was The Queen Elizabeth Story. I had already written The Chronicles of Robin Hood, but that was a re-telling, an adopted child, while the Q.E.S. was the first book born out of my own being. The other was The Eagle of the Ninth. I hope and think that I have written better books since; but Eagle, with this quality of specialness, of delight, of coming as a bird sings, remains my best-beloved among my own books, and – presumably something of all this passes through the writing, to reach out to the reader on the far side – it still seems to be the most generally popular with children, too.
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 but 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. In writing it, I don’t think I ever stopped to wonder whether it was supposed to be for adults or children; it was just the story I wanted to write, the book of my heart. It was set in the eighteenth century, which was odd, because I have always claimed that I can’t handle anything later than the Civil War: that if I try, it turns to Cloak-and-Dagger on me. This was certainly not Cloak-and-Dagger; it was a very simple and quiet story, tracing a few months in the life of Jane-Anne, aged eleven and sent, while her mother recovered from a miscarriage, 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. (Yes, of course, if there seems anything familiar about this, a good deal of it found its way years later, or sixteen hundred years earlier, whichever way you like to look at it, into the Summer which Marcus spent convalescing with Uncle Aquila, in The Eagle of the Ninth. Even the rescue operation carried out, under protest, by the older man, even the second probing of the young man’s wound.) Looking back, I realize 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, with its candles on the table and the monstrous nod-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, to reinforce her prayers that God would ‘Make It All Right’ for Hugh, undergoing that second probing of the wound.
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 (I must have been about twenty, but I think I was young for my age) that I had accorded to my small heroine.
And in the end it got out of hand and went wrong, because I had not the experience, either of life or of writing, to know that it was an idyll, a Summer fragment that reached its natural end when, with the apples ripening on the trees at the bottom of the garden, Jane-Anne departed back to her family and Hugh set off to walk the wards of a big London hospital and train to be a doctor like his father. I tried to carry on through a second half that refused to come to life, to a conventional Happy Ever After ending that had no true place in the story. And because it would not work out, I thought simply that it was destined to remain unfinished – and put it away in a drawer, but never forgot about it.
Later, echoes of it, lingering around my mind, found their way into other books, notably into that Summer in The Eagle of the Ninth. Later still, when my father and I moved from Devon to Sussex, I found the old manuscript, and consigned it, along with quite a few other things that I have since regretted, to the bonfire.
I wish so much I had not. It was the first story I ever wrote, and despite all its faults, I began learning my trade in the writing of it; and no book since has ever given me quite the joy that it gave me.
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.
no subject
Date: 2020-05-02 12:36 am (UTC)As for earlier writing vs later writing--I know that I was writing stuff in middle school and high school, but frankly I don't remember any of it clearly and I don't think I ever made it more than 20 pages into any one story. For me, I mark the start of my writing career when I was in college and started writing fanfic. I do think I was less aware in those days of certain stylistic elements and structural choices than I am now, but can't say that it's made me less "free" as a writer. In fact, I'd have to go with the opposite--with experience has come a greater ability to express myself. I don't have any earlier writings that I look back on with such regretful fondness as Sutcliff.
This sure made me want to read that early book of hers, though!
no subject
Date: 2020-05-02 12:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-05-03 04:56 pm (UTC)I’ve definitely had the experience of some stories “writing themselves”, while working on others is like wading through knee-high molasses. Like
no subject
Date: 2020-05-04 01:49 am (UTC)That's a good point – "convalescent patient" for main character would come as naturally to her as "lonely kid". And maybe his having, in Marcus's case, a lot more plot to get through before the Happily Ever After helps.