There is a new book which we sell in the shop called This Dark Country: Women Artists, Still Life and Intimacy in the Early Twentieth Century by Rebecca Birrell. Tragically, it has no colour reproductions; it has this beautiful Carrington still life (Tulips in a Staffordshire Jug) on the cover but then pale almost unsee-able tiny black and white photographs. We shall remedy this on the Persephone Post this week. Because the book is good, it has just been very ill-served by its publisher.

And the man himself – RC Sherriff at about the time he wrote The Fortnight in September.

Probably mythically, Bognor Regis is known to most people because of King George V (1865-1936). He had an operation in 1928  and it was decided he should convalesce at Graigwell House in Bognor.  As a result, he was asked to bestow the suffix Regis (of the King) on Bognor. When the petition was presented he supposedly replied, 'Oh, bugger Bognor.' But the petitioners were told, 'the King has been graciously pleased to grant your request' which is why it is called Bognor Regis. A slightly different version of the  incident is that the King, upon being told, shortly before his death, that he would soon be well enough to revisit the town, uttered the words 'Bugger Bognor!' (Wikipedia here). So when the Stevens family went to Bognor (the book was published in 1932 and must be set around 1930) it was then enjoying its new association with royalty.

This is Bognor again and this is exactly the atmosphere in the book. Notice how everybody is fully clothed!

And of course what kind of beach hut the family has is an important part of the holiday, or rather one of the initial stresses. This is Bognor Regis in the 1930s, as Sherriff was re-imagining it in The Fortnight in September. We once had a Persephone outing to Bognor and in some ways not that much has changed even now.

This week on the Post: in honour of The Fortnight in September being read on Radio 4 – for a fortnight –  we are celebrating the book in various tangental ways. First of all a photograph of Bognor Regis Station, which is where the Stevens family arrives after their journey from South London. Who would imagine that a novelist could make a railway journey so trivial yet so epic, and so interesting? (The Morris Traveller makes it obvious that this is a 1960s photograph, but the station would have been the same in the '30s.)

This jolly scene - "Silver Morning, Aldeburgh Beach" (1931) by Algernon Talmage, currently in the Bushey Museum in Hertfordshire - appears on the jacket of the Classic edition of PB no.67, The Fortnight in September by R. C. Sherriff. The Fortnight in September is going to be on Radio 4 from Monday, featuring Adrian Scarborough (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000zcdm) and all of us here at Persephone Books are looking forward to it very much.