Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Sherriff, R. C.

Sherriff, R. C.

Greengates, [28] 38; The Fortnight in September, [28] 38; [75] 7; The Hopkins Manuscript, [81] 30

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20240301093015 Julia-Stielstra-on-R.C.-Sheriff,-Slightly-Foxed-81

Reaching for the Moon

Julie Stielstra on R. C. Sherriff, The Hopkins Manuscript

Edward Hopkins is a middle-aged bachelor, retired from teaching arithmetic to breed poultry in the English countryside. He gardens, he is vainglorious about his prize-winning chickens, and he is a regular attendee at meetings of the British Lunar Society. He is also an arrogant snob, utterly self-absorbed and lacking in self-awareness. He tells us he has a ‘gift for friendship’ and a ‘restful, pleasant personality’. Among his neighbours he has ‘selected’ two gentlemen, with whom he has spent happy evenings ‘discussing my poultry until long past midnight . . . It was a great regret to me when both of them decided to go and live farther away.’ Oh, I thought, this is going to be good.
20220901101841 Galen O'Hanlon on R.C. Sherriff, The Fortnight in September, Slightly Foxed 75

Beside the Seaside

Galen O’Hanlen on R. C. Sherriff, The Fortnight in September

There is something timeless about the British seaside holiday. When I was a child we’d visit my grandparents, who had a beach hut at Studland on the Dorset coast. I would spend happy afternoons playing elaborate games in the sand, interrupted only by Granny leaping from the beach hut in her skirted bathing suit, calling out to me: ‘Galey darling, we are going for a swim!’ This would fill me with terror: I had still not yet learnt to swim. ‘Nonsense!’ she’d say, diving in. When I refused to go further than mid-shin, she’d put a thumb to her nose and surge off in a no-nonsense breaststroke. This daily ordeal taught me that a family holiday by the sea is not a straightforwardly happy affair: there are always, as my mum would say, good bits and bad bits.
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Behind the Privet Hedge

Juliet Gardiner on R. C. Sherriff, The Fortnight in September and Greengates

In 1936 my father designed the house in which I grew up in the Fifties. I would like to say that it was a textbook example of Thirties Modernism, like a small-scale model of an ocean liner in dry dock, with sinuous white curving walls punctuated by Crittall metal windows, and a flat roof – that signifier of all that was modern (or ‘moderne’ in house-speak). The inside white à la Syrie Maugham, with minimalist pale plywood furniture, maybe a Marion Dorn cubist-design rug on the herringbone parquet floor, smudgy John Piper textiles hung at the windows. A regular ‘machine for living’, form elegantly following function. Only it wasn’t.

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