‘Caravan’ by Anne Enright

There’s no such thing as a holiday when you’ve got young kids – it’s same shit, different location, with the added complication of being in unfamiliar surroundings (for them) and having to deal with the little buggers when they’re over-tired, over-excited, radged on sugar, or some deadly combination of all three, which they generally are for The Whole Fucking Time (you).

Anne Enright captures the experience in all its glorious misery in ‘Caravan’, which sees a mam, Michelle, going stir-crazy in the titular tin can as she attempts to deal with a Sisyphean pile of damp washing and keep her brood clean, fed, clothed and entertained, despairing all the while at how they pale in the shadow of the Perfect Family next door.

She’s a magnificent writer – incredibly subtle and perceptive, with a faultless ear for vernacular speech and an eye for the sort of tiny details that make her stories and characters feel 100% real; she’s also possessed of a devastatingly dry wit and wry sense of humour which she uses to excruciating effect here, especially in the conversation Michelle has with her kids in the car on the way home.

She’s best known for her novels (which are, it has to be said, astonishing in places), but her short stories are a treasure trove of tragi-comic delights and well worth seeking out.

First published in The Guardian, October 2007, and available to read online here; collected in Taking Pictures, Jonathan Cape, 2008, and Yesterday’s Weather, Vintage, 2009. Picked by Stu Hennigan. Stu is a writer, poet and musician from the north of England. His non-fiction book Ghost Signs: Poverty and the Pandemic is published by Bluemoose. You can read his individual Personal Anthology and other occasional selections here.

‘Our Field’ by Juliana Horatia Ewing

A family of children discover an undisturbed field full of mosses and wildflowers, spend long summer days deeply embedded there with their dog, and find a way to pay for the dog licence so they can keep him.  

This is a timeless classic, which I read as a child, and, it turns out, have remembered for decades. It is full of forensically detailed natural history, interwoven with playful activity: “sometimes I was a moss-merchant, for there were ten different kinds of moss by the brook, and sometimes I was a jeweller, and sold daisy-chains and pebbles, and coral sets made of holly berries, and oak-apple necklaces; and sometimes I kept provisions, like earth-nuts and mallow-cheeses, and mushrooms; and sometimes I kept a flower-shop, and sold nosegays and wreaths, and umbrellas made of rushes…”

Old-fashioned without being preachy, and especially appealing for those who like stories of families or groups of children, this little gem of a story holds its own magnificently amongst our contemporary enthusiasm for nature writing.

First published 1876. Picked by Clara Abrahams

‘Serious Swimmers’ by Michel Faber

I chose this story as a complement to Kieron Pim’s choice last week of ‘The Swimmer’ by John Cheever. Here, Gail takes her estranged son Anthony out on a custody visit to the swimming pool, under the scrutiny of their social worker. The water givest hem a place to learn about each other, find freedom and a hint of shared joy.

Unlike Neddy Merrell’s liberated trip across the cracked tiles of American suburbia in ‘The Swimmer’, Gail is obliged to be poolside due to the choice of a higher power in the Australian social care system. Her visit is about being observed and tied down by her past choices. Neddy’s inner Narcissist has fallen in love with his own reflection in the water and forgotten about his friends and distant family. Gail’s downfall has been narcotics, and the swimming pool exposes her vulnerabilities. We encounter the floating sticking plaster of reality underneath the surface of Neddy’s pool, yet it offers us a glimmer of sunlight through Anthony’s innocent truth and the promise of a future bond together.

Pools are fab locations as they contrast the calming internal act of swimming with a place which (unless you live in the Hamptons) is usually a disagreeable municipal leisure centre, making it a great leveller and source of endless fun with a foam noodle.

First published in Prospect, January 2005, and available to read online here. Collected in The Fahrenheit Twins, Canongate, 2005. Picked by Hannah Piekarz. Hannah is a writer and researcher, also an occasional pharmacist

‘Blow It’ by Patricia Highsmith

With all due respect to late-February Boston, summer’s the season I dread: in childhood the season of boredom; in early maturity, of physical assaults, desertions, and extremely bad decisions. I’m fish-belly pale, with one carcinoma already knifed out, and even ten minutes at 29°C are enough to begin scooping gray matter from my dutch-oven skull and reduce me to a monosyllabic zombie shambling more or less in any direction you lead.

If my most memorable warm-weather traumas had been triggered by mechanical rather than organic failure, Alfred Bester’s ‘Fondly Fahrenheit’ would be the seasonal selection.

Instead I thought of this stripped-down barely-a-story, simple enough for even the sun-addled to follow. In the summer an upwardly mobile Manhattanite’s fancy turns to thoughts of a Westchester County home — “white, with a lawn, with grown-up trees” — which proves one egg too many for his juggling to handle.

Highsmith was a diagnostician of gender roles, generally presenting the threat of physical violence as a comorbidity of maleness. But, as ‘Blow It’ demonstrates, the Highsmith-male trinity of presumed competence, prescribed sense of agency, and near-absolute absence of rational motive doesn’t need bloodshed to generate recognizable nightmares. What say let’s climb out of these sweaty clothes and into a dry martini?

First published in The Black House, William Heinemann, 1981; reprinted in The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith, Norton, 2001. Picked by Ray Davis. Davis lives in the blessedly temperate San Francisco area and publishes his own and others’ work to pseudopodium.org from a cool dark basement. You can read his individual Personal Anthology here.

‘Wizards’ by Naomi Ishiguro

‘Wizards’ is the first story in Escape Routes, Naomi Ishiguro’s debut collection. It’s about two young men, strangers whose lives brush each other one fateful day in Brighton, as strangers’ lives do on summer days in seaside towns. Peter (or ‘Luciano the Diviner’, as he’s known to his customers) has a fortune-telling stall and his father’s voice in his head, criticising everything he does; Alfie can’t play with the other children, but he’s going to become a wizard when he turns eleven, so he has something to look forward to. Both are facing that summer feeling, destined to return again and again, like a season, throughout one’s life: perched on an ocean of possibilities, they brace themselves to jump in, with no clue what’s going to happen next.

Ishiguro’s beautiful, sea-clear prose effortlessly evokes the texture of childhood holidays, in a story that smells of suncream and has the too-sweet taste of ice lollies. Above all, it conjures the exhilarating and terrifying feeling of endless possibilities associated with the first days of summer.

First published in Escape Routes, Tinder Press, 2020. Picked by Raffaella Sero. Raffaella is a writer and theatre-maker. Her fiction has appeared in The Honest Ulsterman, Profiles Journal, Seaside Gothic and Passageways (Sans. Press). Her one-woman show The Other will be on at the King’s Head Theatre in London on 21st July and at the Edinburgh Fringe in August 2023.

‘Korea’ by John McGahern

What could be more idyllic than a father and son spending a summer’s day fishing? Plenty of things, it turns out, as is usually the case in a McGahern story, especially one about father-son relationships. No quality time to be had in this case. For one thing, the fishing is not about catching a mess of trout to fry up for a leisurely campfire meal under the stars; it’s about making enough extra money to supplement the bare subsistence income from a small family farm. The fish are oily eels supplied to London restaurants, and even the poor man’s white fish is reserved for selling in local village. And to make things worse, the father is in danger of losing his commercial fishing license to make way for a growing tourist trade of holiday fisherman who don’t like competition.

Money is so tight that the father suggests the son consider emigrating to America, “the land of opportunity,” unlike Ireland, “a poky place … where all’s there’s room for is to make holes in pints of porter.” The father says he’ll “scrape” together money for fare somehow. The son says he’ll think about it. He prefers to wait for results of his school exams, which will dictate his future options, or lack thereof. The father doesn’t have much use of “highfalutin” learning. Regardless, both know this is their last summer working together on the river, and that tension hangs over the story. (Sorry, no names provided, only nameless characters negotiating a timeless business of family obligations and welfare.)

McGahern scaffolds this conflict with two short, searing stories about war, starting with the father’s traumatic experience as POW in the 1919 Anglo-Irish War of Independence, when he witnessed two executions of comrades, barely escaping a similar fate by luck of the draw. He reveals this experience only at the prodding of the son, and later regrets having spoken of it, cutting the son off when he attempts to bring it up again because reliving the war “disturbed me no end. … And the most I think is that if I’d conducted my own wars, and let the fool country fend for itself, I’d be much better off today. I don’t want to talk about it.” The only thing he does want to talk about is the son going to America.

The second story concerns a former local boy – who does have a name: Luke Moran – who went to America, was drafted, and died fighting in Korea. In compensation, the family gets a hero’s funeral for beloved son Luke and a $10,000 insurance payment from U.S. government, in addition to monthly $250 payments Luke earned while on duty. (Naming “Luke” makes him appear more alive in death than our father-son duo, who appear more dead in life.) A veritable lottery, even if the price of tickets was steep.

While preparing for another night on the river, the son learns of these events by overhearing a conversation between his father and a neighbor, and realizes the father’s ulterior motive for shipping him off to America: betting the farm, literally, on prospects of the son getting drafted and suffering a similar fate: “In the darkness of the lavatory between the boxes of crawling worms before we set the night line for the eels I knew my youth had ended.” The father’s “personal wars” have been passed on to the son, who conducts his own private ambush by declining the father’s offer to emigrate, acknowledging, “It’ll be my own funeral,” if things don’t work out for him in Ireland.

The casualties of this family war are piling up, and the roiling mixture of the son’s guilt, love, and murderous thoughts for his father in the final paragraph buckles my knees every time I read this story.

First published in The Atlantic, October 1969, and available to read here. Collected in Nightlines, Faber & Faber, 1970; also in John McGahern: The Collected Stories, Vintage, 1992, and Irish Short Stories, The Folio Society, 1999, which includes a powerful set of illustrations, one for each story, by Irish printmaker David R. Rooney. Picked by Tom McGohey. Tom taught Composition and directed The Writing Center at Wake Forest University for 20 years. He has published essays in Fourth Genre, Sport Literate, and Thread. Two of his essays have been cited as “Notable Essays” in Best American Essays.

‘The Fullness of Summer’ by Quim Monzó, translated by Peter Bush

For those of us who live in the UK, summer is an elusive thing. We pass the dark winter and chilly spring looking toward the dog days with hope and excitement, making plans for weekends away, music festivals, picnics on a lawn or hillside, long lunches with friends. We pass the damp autumn and cold winter wistfully regretting their passing with nostalgia and, quite often, a sense of regret at opportunities squandered. The few brief days the season does offer are hardly enough to give us the chance to complain about the heat, the flies, the inability to sleep, or the fact that they will soon be over. 

What better way to preserve those memories with a photograph? By snapping away we can, surely, hold on to such fleeting pleasures, and comfort ourselves with them through the bleaker months. 

Though, I imagine, the summers are rather different in Catalonia, this is the idea that Catalan writer Quim Monzó puts forward in ‘The Fullness of Summer.’ An extended family meet for their summer reunion, and the men in the group, cameras in hand, insist on preserving each and every moment. The long lunch and the day itself ends with everyone so busy preparing and posing, that they have scarcely noticed it took place at all. Like an English summer, the story is incredibly brief, and ends almost as soon as it has begun.

Published in English in A Thousand Morons, Open Letter, 2012 and The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories, Penguin Classics, 2021) – picked by CD Rose. Rose is the author of The Blind Accordionist and Who’s Who When Everyone Is Someone Else and the editor of The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure (all published by Melville House). You can read his individual Personal Anthology and other occasional selections here.

‘The Long Voyage’ by Leonardo Sciascia, translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell

The summer holidays, travel for some across the sea, always makes me think of Sciascia’s ‘The Long Voyage’. Irony delivered without sentimentality. The money to be made out of other people’s dreams, the power of those dreams to drive thousands of people from their home to strange lands, in this case post-war America, the land of Cockaigne. Bristling with tall and wild tales of of the riches to be found there. A loss of love for home, affection for it starved out of you. The tragedy of this. The success stories that filter back from overseas to fuel those dreams, and more besides. If only we could here the voices of today’s migrants with such clarity, such simple storytelling, the universal and timeless motivation, what it is to be human, to want better, no matter what, to survive, but all of this wrapped up as human comedy. Which it is, until it isn’t. 

In an Italian mountain village I once met an old woman who has never seen the sea despite living less than 30 kilometres from it. Nothing ever good comes from it she told me. I know what it look like, I’ve seen the Titanic, she said. Which probably explains her opinion. Also the fact that both her sons disappeared into America, letters home drying up in the years before they both died there.

Dreams bind us, yet we grope around in the dark pursuing them. Others prey on us for money. Desperate people both. 

‘The Long Journey’ is a small tragedy, but sits alongside, is sibling to much bigger ones, and the summer reminds me of this story which gives me pause, as I pack my bags for my holidays.

First published as ‘Il lungo viaggio’ in L’Unità, October 1962. First published in English translation in The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, edited by Jhumpa Lahiri, Penguin, 2019) – picked by Wayne Holloway. Wayne is a writer/director living in London. He has published two novels, Bindlestiff and Our Struggle, both with Influx Press. You can read his individual Personal Anthology here.

‘The Letter Writers’ by Elizabeth Taylor 

In Elizabeth Taylor’s tragicomic classic ‘The Letter Writers’ a woman prepares to meet a man she’s corresponded with for ten years. Emily and Edmund, an English novelist based in Rome, have never met before in person. With Edmund visiting for the day, Emily has planned a luxurious meal, an outfit change and a crisis of self-confidence:

“At eleven o’clock, Emily went down to the village to fetch the lobsters. The heat unsteadied the air, light shimmered and glanced off leaves and telegraph wires and the flag on the church tower spreading out in a small breeze, then dropping, wavered against the sky, as if it were flapping underwater.

She wore an old cotton frock, and meant to change it at the last moment, when the food was all ready and the table laid.” 

Charged by descriptions of hot weather and glinting light, ‘The Letter Writers’ hums with the headiness of summer. As Emily walks to the village, the sun seems “to touch her bones – her spine, her shoulder-blades, her skull”. Her emotions are fraught and refracted across the landscape, where the sea glitters “like a great sheet of metal” and the late morning silence has the effect of “drugging the brain and slowing the limbs.”

For years, Emily had been tidying her thoughts and observations into sentences for Edmund. “Her days were not full or busy and the gathering of little things to write to him about took up a large part of her time.” There are shades of Anita Brookner in Taylor’s story of a woman – by turns intelligent and idle – conflicted by the prospect of entertaining a man. On this day, she is “more agitated than she could ever remember being”; she’s angry at herself for agreeing to let Edmund come to see her on his visit to England. 

At home, Emily looks in the mirror, ashamed by the “wings of white hair at her temples” and her poor complexion, “unevenly pitted, from an illness when she was a child. As a girl, she had looked at her reflection and thought ‘No one will ever want to marry me’ and no one had.” She sips sherry to stop her hands from shaking; she straightens the knives and forks on the table, and shakes the salt in the cellar until it’s “nicely level”. Her cat smells lobster in the air, so she puts the dish high up on a dresser and covers it with a piece of muslin. 

To say any more would risk spoiling this wonderful story – suffice it to say that the genius of ‘The Letter Writers’ lies in how Taylor flips from Emily’s point of view into Edmund’s perspective as he arrives at the door: “At the sight of the distraught woman with untidy hair and her eyes full of tears, he took a pace back … She was incoherent and he could not follow what she was saying … she seemed to him to be rather drunk.”

Much like Mary Costello’s stunning story ‘The Astral Plane’ – where a man and woman meet for the first time after an affair-in-emails – ‘The Letter Writers’ stretches a wire between two islands: writing and life. Inevitably the tightrope snaps, and after ten years of correspondence, Emily and Edmund are marooned from each other. “There was no more to say, not a word more to be wrung out of the weather, or the restaurant in Rome they had found they had in common, or the annoyances of travel – the train that was late and the cabin that was stuffy. Worn-out, she still cast about for a subject to embark on. The silence was unendurable.” 

What makes ‘The Letter Writers’ so memorable is how, after a short time in a room together, the bridge of words that bound Emily and Edmund falls down, and wounds them. “Don’t say anything. Don’t talk of it,’ she begged him, standing with her hands pressed hard against the door behind her. She shrank from words, thinking of the scars they leave, which she would be left to tend when he was gone.” 

First published in The New Yorker, May 1958, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in The Blush and Other Stories, Peter Davies 1958, republished by Virago Modern Classics, 1986. Also in Complete Short Stories, Virago, 2012. Picked by Emma Cummins. Emma manages the Guardian Bookshop and has written for The Guardian, The Quietus and Aesthetica Magazine. She was shortlisted for Fish Publishing’s Short Memoir Prize and tweets @EmmaCummins. 

‘Hodel’ by Sholom Aleichem, translated by Julius and Frances Butwin

Sholom Aleichem, the pen name of Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich, is probably the best-known writer of Yiddish short stories. Many of them concern Tevye the dairyman, a pious, simple man whom life sets an inordinate number of trials, often concerning his daughters. This story is a bittersweet account of a father’s reluctant acceptance that he must let his daughter Hodel become her own person, even if that means making mistakes, and even if it means her unwisely falling in love with a firebrand young revolutionary with whom she plans to change the world. I discovered it when I picked up a second-hand copy of The Penguin Book of Jewish Short Stories, attracted partly by my interest in Jewish literature, but also because it was edited by Emanuel Litvinoff, whom I had met a few years previously. Litvinoff was an eminent Anglo-Jewish writer of the mid- to late-20th Century. I wrote a biography of his nefarious half-brother David Litvinoff, and interviewed Emanuel about David in 2010, when he was 95 years old. It was an honour to meet him, and I only wish I’d known about this book already so we could also have discussed his selections. I imagine that he chose ‘Hodel’ for its delicately wistful tone, its portrayal of father-daughter relationships and the power of its famous closing lines, uttered by Tevye to the narrator after he has forlornly bid Hodel farewell. “And now let’s talk about more cheerful things. Tell me, what news is there about the cholera in Odessa?”

First published as ‘Hodl’ in Yiddish in 1894; first published in translation in Tevye’s Daughters: Collected Stories of Sholom Aleichem, Crown, 1949, and collected in The Penguin Book of Jewish Short Stories, Penguin, 1979

‘If She Bends, She Breaks’ by John Gordon

For my second choice I’m going back to a story that was one of my stand-out reading experiences as a young boy. Aidan Chambers’ ghost story anthology for children, Ghost After Ghost, contains various tales that gave me an enjoyable shudder. But this one got right under my skin. Perhaps the East Anglian setting made it feel close to home – it is set in the Fens and I lived in north Norfolk at the time – but mostly it’s to do with John Gordon’s ability to convey the unforgiving bleakness of a fenland winter, the way we begin to sense the fear beneath the joshing schoolkids’ bravado as they dare each other to step out on to the frozen drainage dyke, and the skill with which he reveals a chilling realisation about the narrator. Maybe that twist would be more quickly apparent to an adult reader, but to the eight-year-old me it prompted a shiver down my spine as cold as the black water beneath the ice on a fenland canal.

First published in Ghost After Ghost, ed. Aidan Chambers, Kestrel, 1982, and collected in Catch Your Death and Other Stories, by John Gordon, Patrick Hardy, 1983; regularly anthologised thereafter

‘Stickeen’ by John Muir

Now for one that means a lot to my children, and by association it means a lot to me too. In 2018 we had a holiday in California, including a couple of nights in San Francisco. The City Lights Bookstore stayed open until midnight at that time (its website suggests the opening hours have changed since then) so one night, once my wife and our three daughters were in bed, I walked for 45 minutes across the city to visit the literary landmark founded in 1955 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. (That journey is a whole different story, one that revealed to me the severity of San Francisco’s homelessness problem, and that I told here if anyone’s interested) I picked up a copy of Ferlinghetti’s Pictures of the Gone World, and a couple of books for my daughters: The Wonderful Oby James Thurber, and this little story by John Muir.

Muir was a Scottish-American naturalist, adventurer and author who was responsible for preserving great swathes of American wilderness that became national parks. In 1880 he undertook an expedition to Alaska. As he and his Native American crew prepared to depart, they were joined by a missionary reverend and then by his “little black dog that immediately made himself at home by curling up in a hollow among the baggage”. Muir was a dog-lover but thought this one “so small and worthless that I objected to his going”, given that they were likely to spend weeks out in the cold rain and snow. “But his master assured me that he would be no trouble at all; that he was a perfect wonder of a dog, could endure cold and hunger like a bear, swim like a seal, and was wondrous wise and cunning, etc., making out a list of virtues to show he might be the most interesting member of the party.”

I read the story to my girls when we got back home to Norwich, and we were all swept up into the perilous adventure. I won’t say more than that when faced with arduous weather and terrifying crevasses, little Stickeen – named after the Native American tribe – proved braver and bolder than most humans and became an inspiration: to those on the Alaskan adventure, and to those of us who read about him in the comfort of our homes today.

First published in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, September 1897; expanded into book form in 1909, with many subsequent editions

‘The Fox and the Goose’, traditional song

This is a song that dates from at least 1500, but the version I grew up knowing was popularised during the mid-20th Century. There’s a lovely recording of it from 1946 by Burl Ives, and it became something of a standard during the 1960s folk revival. I first heard this on a record by the folk singer Julie Felix that my mum used to play when I was very young. It’s a song I strongly associate with my early childhood, and the nostalgia is heightened by the fact my mum died last year; but I also associate with being a dad as my daughters love it too. I’ve often played it for them on guitar and we sing it together.  

It’s interesting to think about it as a short story, one that has been whittled down to its essentials over the centuries, because there’s a lot packed into its seven verses. There’s an atmospheric sense of place – it’s a cold, moonlit night and the fox has a long journey from his den to the farm. When he gets there, he declares that a couple of the birds in the farmer’s pen are going to “grease my chin” – an enjoyably archaic phrase meaning to gorge yourself on a meal so that it’s smeared around your mouth. (Think of the foxes eating in Wes Anderson’s film adaptation of Fantastic Mr. Fox – I’m sure he must know this song!)

There’s the savagery of the fox catching the duck and the goose, captured in a few brutal images: “He grabbed the grey goose by the neck, threw the duck across his back; he didn’t mind their quack, quack, quack, and their legs all a-dangling down-o.” There’s the comedy of ‘Old Mother Flipper-Flapper’, the farmer’s wife, who “jumped out of bed, and out of the window she poked her head” before alerting her husband. Then there’s a chase – the farmer sets off in hot pursuit but the fox (the ‘fals fox’ in the original Middle English, ‘fals’ meaning cunning or deceitful) manages to elude him and flee. There’s filial ingratitude – when he brings this fine meal back to his wife and cubs, “the little ones … say: ‘Daddy, daddy, go back again, for it must be a mighty fine town-o!’” And after that there’s a moral too. Rather than go running back again to satisfy his children, the fox and his wife tuck into the meal – “they’d never had such a supper in their life!” – while the little ones get to chew on the bones, presumably while reflecting on the consequences of their greed.

The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole, entry for July 4th, 1982, by Sue Townsend

I read the Adrian Mole books in the mid-Eighties when I was nine or ten years old and found them hilarious, although on rereading them as an adult I’ve realised how many subtleties and references went over my head at the time. This entry, though, I found as affecting then as I do now; it’s only now that I’m a bit better able to articulate why. The diary format gives Adrian’s notes a self-containment that sometimes lends them the quality of a short story. Here Sue Townsend is at her brilliant best in creating a sketch of domestic life that subtly conveys the tensions of a relationship and the fears that can come with old age: of death, of losing one’s dignity, of loneliness.

Bert Baxter, the elderly man whom Adrian has volunteered to assist through his school’s Good Samaritan scheme, urgently summons him one evening while he’s at home eating his spaghetti Bolognese. Adrian arrives at Bert’s council house to find that the television has been turned off, ‘so I knew something serious had happened’. It turns out that Bert’s wife, Queenie, has had ‘a bad turn’. She’s in bed without her make-up on. This is how Adrian relates the subsequent exchange:

“I asked her what was wrong. ‘I’ve been having pains like red-hot needles in my chest.’ Bert interrupted. ‘You said the pains were like red-hot knives five minutes ago!’

‘Needles, knives, who cares?’ she said.”

It’s a brilliant exchange of dialogue that says so much in so few words about the participants’ characters and their testy but affectionate relationship. Adrian asks Bert if he’s called the doctor, and Bert says he hasn’t because Queenie is frightened of doctors. Adrian phones home instead, and soon both his parents come round and take control. They call an ambulance.

“It was a good job they did because while it was coming Queenie went a bit strange and started talking about ration books and stuff,” reports the perennially naive Adrian: later, his mother will call from the hospital to confirm that Queenie has had a stroke. Bert’s brusque concern for his wife becomes clear as he holds her hand and calls her a “daft old bat”. Just as the ambulance men are shutting the doors and preparing the drive away, Queenie calls to Adrian to fetch her rouge. “I’m not going until I’ve got me rouge.” Adrian has to rifle through Queenie’s possessions in her bedroom to find it. The dire circumstances mean that the usual social protocols fall away and he is suddenly foraging through the accumulated private clutter of these elderly people’s lives, glimpsing something of their interiors: their emotional attachments, their fears. “The top was covered in pots and hairnets and hairpins and china dishes and lace mats and photos of babies and weddings.” He finds the rouge in a drawer. Once she’s gone, a forlorn Bert says: “What am I going to do without my girl to help me?”

The Mole family invite to come home with them but he won’t leave the house, as he’s scared the council will take it away from him. The story has such a mixture of the particular and the universal: a few paragraphs set in an elderly couple’s council house in Leicester in 1982 and you’re deep inside Thatcher’s Britain, but of course the issues that come with old age always resonate. Townsend handles this little story with such tenderness, such economy and poignancy. She’s a writer I miss very much.

First published by Puffin/Methuen, 1984