T he Offing by Benjamin Myers is one of those irrepressibly feelgood novels that elicits deep sighs and brings on bouts of daydreaming. Written in the style of Laurie Lee meets Robert McFarlane, you feel the sun on your face as you stroll the sumptuous descriptions of a post-war Yorkshire countryside.
I was bereft when I finished the last page and intend to read it again as soon as possible – something I have never done before.
Synopsis
T he Offing by Benjamin Myers tells the story of sixteen-year-old Robert Appleyard who, in post-World War II Britain, finishes his exams and sets out from coal-blackened Durham, to spend his last summer of freedom before returning to a life of hardship, danger and dust in the coal mines, just as his father and grandfather did before him.
As spring awakens and morphs into the heat of summer, Robert finds himself in a hidden valley above the coast of Robin Hood’s Bay where he encounters Dulcie and her faithful German shepherd, Butler.
Older, worldly-wise, and decidedly eccentric, Dulcie introduces Robert to good food, poetry, and the wisdom of her considerable life experiences. In return, Robert begins to tackle some of the decay that characterises Dulcie’s ramshackle home and overgrown land. Over the course of a long, hot summer we learn more about Dulcie’s past while witnessing the growth of Robert from shy lad to affable, confident man.
It was a summer that would change both of their lives.
My Review
T he war is still fresh in the landscapes and minds of Britain as Robert sets out. Growing up during the conflict, although he wasn’t a direct part of it, he has seen and felt its consequences:
Wars continue long after the fighting has stopped, and the world felt then as if it were full of holes. It appeared to me scarred and shattered, a place made senseless by those in positions of power. Everything was fragments, everything burnt.
I was neither old enough to have made myself a hero nor young enough to have escaped the newsreel images or the long shadows that the returning soldiers dragged behind them like empty coffins. For no one ever really wins a war: some just lose a little less than others.
I was a child when it began and a young man when it ended and in the wake of this conflict visible loss was everywhere, hanging like a great heavy cloud over the island, and no amount of red, white and blue bunting or medals pinned to the sobbing chests of its survivors could change that.
Through the eyes of a boy growing up in the brutal, blackened landscape of the northeast mining country, Myers bestows a simple yet sumptuous quality to his descriptions of the changing landscape as the boy moves further away from coal dust and into the light and warmth of a new spring:
The larger part of my young years so far had been spent staring out of classroom windows longing for a life lived outside, willing the bell to chime down the corridors so that I might run free through the fields.
And now here, finally, it was all around me, an unfolding wonderland, a swirling season in bloom alive with the warm sound of wood pigeons and drilling woodpeckers, and the scents of ragwort, balsam and, beyond the trees in the sloping fields, the heady, sedative musk of rapeseed.
Soon too there would be the sight of swallows and swifts returning from North Africa to summer here, the centre of the world, Northern England, the greenest land there ever was, so pungent and lush it could make a young man dizzy.
As our spring morphs into summer, I recommend making time to sit in the sun and enjoy the short but oh-so-sweet, The Offing by Benjamin Myers.
