![]() In the company of Tom Birkin, we return to the summer of 1920, as he, a young, damaged survivor of the First World War arrives in the village of Oxgodby in Yorkshire. ![]() They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.” We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours for ever-the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on belfry floor, a remembered voice, a loved face. “And, at such a time, for a few of us there will always be a tugging at the heart-knowing a precious moment had gone and we not there. There is an obvious sadness in that – that yearning for a moment that passed too quickly – the acknowledgement that the time for such moments has almost certainly come and gone. The memory of which he has carried with him ever since through a long life – which we judge to have been rather less perfect. There is a beautiful elegiac quality to the story – which is told with a deep sigh for a time that is long past – narrated by a man in old age looking back to one, long perfect summer that was never to be repeated. ![]() It is a book I have had on my shelf for several years – but it was Novellas in November that finally got me to ferret it out and read it.Īs I had been told, it really is a beautiful novella – a short work that lingers long in the memory I am sure. ![]() I have lost count of the number of people who have written enthusiastically about A Month in the Country. ![]()
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