Summer

Summer gives the novel its working calendar and its measure of change: the season brings the Larkins their harvest income, makes weather an immediate economic force, and carries the family from spring’s first picking to the full growth of the year and, finally, an Atlantic gale in France. Its brightness is never merely scenic. Sun, rain, ripening fruit, and the length of the season shape what the family does and what it can expect from the future.

The Harvest Calendar

In the first glimpse of the strawberry fields, the truck passes orchards whose branches are faintly pink in sunlight. Fresh yellow straw covers the rows, and Pop explains that the crop will be ready in only a few days. The landscape is already a schedule: the family sees not just fields, but the approaching start of work. When Montgomery later reports that picking at Benacre will begin on Monday, Pop calls it their earliest start yet and credits the weather with bringing the fruit along quickly.

The work extends beyond strawberries. June brings the strawberry harvest and, before the month is out, cherries; cherry picking continues through July. In a good summer, apples may begin before August, alongside early plums and pears. August and September are apple months, September also brings hops, and October potatoes. The progression turns the warm season into a chain of overlapping opportunities, with each crop handing the family on to the next.

That calendar has a direct financial measure. Pop says that a large family can earn fifteen pounds a day from strawberries alone. The prospect is concrete enough to prompt him, passing the rows, to ask the children whether anyone does not want to go picking. Summer’s abundance is therefore inseparable from labor: the bright fields promise income because the family and other pickers will work them.

Weather, Work, and Risk

The season’s favorable weather does not remove its hazards. When strawberry picking begins, the heat is already exceptional: the newspapers have called the previous day, May 30, the hottest in forty years, and the next day promises to be hotter still. The sun bears down on the field, while the woodland shelters the rows from wind. Under that heat, the women pickers shed their blouses and shirts and continue working in bodices or brassieres. Mr Charlton, meanwhile, longs for shade and quiet rather than strawberries, experiencing the same working day as oppressive exposure rather than opportunity.

The harvest is also vulnerable to disease. Pop warns Mr Charlton that varieties including Sovereigns, Climax, and Huxleys are finished, and predicts that within two years strawberries will be gone everywhere. The confidence of the family’s seasonal routine is thus shadowed by a threatened industry. Summer offers income, but it cannot guarantee that the crop or the livelihood built around it will endure.

Mr Charlton’s experience in the field gives the harvest scale as well as heat. Returning to the tent, he adds up the strawberries passing through it and calculates that he has checked in more than a ton in a single day. He reasons that this must represent a substantial sum for the pickers, then turns to the question of its tax position and assumes Pop will know. The summer harvest joins physical work to money and taxation: even a ton of fruit becomes part of the Larkins’ characteristic negotiation with official rules.

From Midsummer to Rain

As summer advances, the novel repeatedly sets expectation against weather. At the country gathering, the rain-darkened morning gives way at half-past eleven to sunshine. Heavy dew begins to dry on the grass, the trees of Bluebell Wood, and the hedgerows; mist lifts from the still air, while water-lilies rise above wet leaves. The change in the sky coincides with fresh activity in the meadow. Pop finds Mariette practising a canter by the river, with Mr Charlton attending her, and remembers the baby she is carrying. The brightening day frames a family future that Pop has momentarily forgotten amid the day’s business.

Later, the season’s abundance appears in a different register: not in a field ready for picking but in the rain that the crops need. Pop welcomes a summer shower because the cherries, plums, and apples will benefit. From the kitchen door, he and Mr Charlton watch the darkness and rain; Mr Charlton thinks of spring passing, May’s buds disappearing, and everything flowering into high summer. Pop calls the rain and the nightingale song that follows it “Perfick.” The word gathers the family’s pleasure in the present weather, while Mr Charlton’s reflection makes the same moment a recognition of time’s swift passage.

July can also feel less like abundance than confinement. One morning, torrents of rain obscure the woods and meadows; near the house, hens shake water from their feathers, geese wander among rusty iron and nettles, and sparrows bathe in muddy pools. Ma regards the day as miserable, the sort of wet summer weather that leaves her feeling bottled up. Pop, by contrast, keeps expecting a beautiful day and asks again after Mariette, whose absence from breakfast is unusual. The season is not a single mood: the same summer weather that nourishes fruit can frustrate, obscure, and unsettle domestic routine.

The Season’s Outer Edge

By the last day of August, the Larkin family’s seasonal journey has reached the coast of France. At half-past six in the evening, Pop draws the Rolls-Royce up outside the Hôtel Beau Rivage as a gale blows in from the Atlantic. Even the sheltered fishing boats look battered; white spray surges along the quay walls, and rain and spray hammer the hotel’s shutter-boards. The cold wind and shrieking harbour weather reverse the familiar image of summer as warmth and settled abundance.

This ending makes the season a structure as well as a backdrop. It begins with straw laid between orchard rows and the promise of strawberry wages, proceeds through cherries, apples, and rain-fed fruit, and arrives at the last day of August under a storm. The crops and weather establish the year’s practical rhythm, while the passage from May’s buds to high summer gives that rhythm an emotional counterpart: growth is plentiful, but it is also swift and already passing. Summer’s defining force is this double movement, sustaining the family in the present while continually reminding it that seasons, harvests, and chances change.