Summer dread

and Trouble Was, by Charlotte Edwardes

I don’t know when I started to loathe summertime. I remember being thrilled by it, as a child. The first day of the year that I could go out into the garden barefoot, the first day we all - my sisters and I - ran out to the car to go somewhere with my mother without coats. First to touch the car got to sit in the front (it was never me).

The rot set in somewhere, probably as a teenager, and it never really left. There was a brief period, when my children were toddlers, that I prayed for springtime. But that’s all gone, now. And I’m back to feeling truly oppressed and exhausted by clocks going forward. When I am holiday, I want it to be sunny and pleasant; I look forward so much to my annual holiday in Pembrokeshire and if it was rainy and dark, I’d be devastated. But when I am at home I prefer bad weather. What sort of psychosis is this?!

“I just hate it,” I gibbered last week, clinging to my husband. “I feel untethered, like I’m just going to float away into the sky and no-one will notice or miss me because there’s no school so no-one cares!”

Make of that what you will.

The debut novel from Charlotte Edwardes, Trouble Was - out in July - is this feeling in a novel. Set in the hot summer of 1976, it is about a chaotic family that must live with cousins for the summer.

Our narrator is nine year-old Frank Dart. Edwardes is very deft at describing the neurotic and anxious fears of a child with an unstable parent, and also his need and drive to just be a child and play. The cousins are evil, the aunt is neglectful, the mother is potty, the summer heat is boiling. It’s all very 70s.

I was born in 1980 and so just got the tail end of this culture, but so much is familiar - making your own ice lollies with squash, the random dead thing you found, those big old houses filled with brown furniture. The crappy food, the urban legends about how if you lean out of the car window your head will get taken off, (or is that trains?), the bottomless threat of other children you don’t know very well, the dangerously un-witnessed things that went on.

Anyway if that sounds like your thing, then please be a magnificent patron of the arts and pre-order Trouble Was. As I keep going on about, a book purchased on pre-order is worth two bought post-publication. Don’t ask me why, it’s just the rules.

How about you - how do you feel about the summer? Am I completely alone in feeling unsettled by it? How do I reverse this poor attitude? Please lose it in the handy comments section below.