Seaside Resorts by Candida Lycett Green

A celebration of British Seaside Resorts by The Oldie's Unwrecked England columnist, beautifully illustrated with colour photographs evoking places one hopes to revisit one day. I was so saddened to hear that the much-loved writer had passed way last month -I loved her style of writings and hope more surfaces in time.
The first glimpse of the sea after an absence always excites me- a feeling triggered no doubt by the memory of childhood holidays; memories which we in turn pass on to our children and grandchildren. For me resorts are places where, when you face out to sea, your cares are behind you: the promenades and sea walls aw the safe divider between the civilised world and the wild.

The Handsomest Young Man in England by Michael Hastings

I bought this illustrated biography of Rupert Brooke in 1970 and am still enjoying leafing through it many years later. A hundred years on from the outbreak of the Great War the reproduced sepia photographs of Rupert Brooke and his friends tell of a lost world, another age. One of my favourite photographs is of Brooke reading to Frances Cornford on a Norfolk beach on August 2nd 1914. Days later he was in training for the Royal Naval Division.
Frances Cornford wrote of 'the young, Apollo, golden haired' 'magnificently unprepared for the long littleness of life'. Like so many of that generation, Brooke lost his life less than a year later. It was W. B. Yeats who described him as 'the handsomest young man in England'.
My mother had a hardback copy of Brooke's poems that I read to her while she lay dying in hospital from septicaemia: ironically, the same illness that took Brooke's life.
We often visit Grantchester, take tea in the Orchard and walk by the river, hearing 'the breeze sobbing in the little trees'. Nothing has changed; time stands still as it did then, over a hundred years ago.
Stands the church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?

The Greatcoat by Helen Dunmore

I enjoyed reading Helen Dunmore's poetry and early novels and this was a welcome return - 239 pages is a good length - short enough to savour and reread. Isabel Carey, recently married, a young doctor's wife in a close-knit Yorkshire community in 1952, feels isolated and lonely in her new role. Her husband is busy and preoccupied, frequently on-call at night. Having found an airman's greatcoat in a cupboard in their rented rooms, Isabel uses it to keep warm. It is then that she starts to hear a tapping at the window...This ghost story is both plausible and fanciful as Isabel's life merges with that of an airman, 'one of many thousands of young men who were ripped out of life before their time'.
'His fingers tasted of nicotine and they trembled and steadied as they touched her, tentatively at first and then stroking her skin with infinite gentleness, as if he hadn't believed he would ever touch a woman's face again.'
In the author's own words: 'the danger is that she will be trapped between the two worlds, belong to neither one nor the other'. Even at the end of the novel there is a hint that the past may still continue to haunt her as 'down on the grass the greatcoat's heavy cloth rippled as if a night wind were walking under it'.