The Booker prize-winning author introduces an excerpt from his latest book – a story of race and class, love and sexuality
, the narrator Dave Win recalls a seaside holiday in the summer of 1962, when he was 14 years old. Dave and his mother, Avril, a dressmaker, live in a small Berkshire market town, and in previous summers they have always gone for a miserable week in Clevedon with his aunt and uncle; but this year they have been taken up by Avril’s new customer, the forceful Mrs Esme Croft, who has swept them off for 10 days in the north Devon resort of Friscombe.
Mum looked up with a frown, but also, in the forcefield of a joker, a quick regretted laugh. “This is my son, David.” There was the Irish girl, Maureen, in a self-absorbed daze about doing things right, who made a dozen shy journeys from the sideboard to the tables, each time bearing a single item – a fish knife, a forgotten napkin, a pat of butter. Her procedure seemed to match the tempo of the kitchen, a semi-deliberate way of filling the long gap between ordering and serving.
For a long stretch of every day we were on the beach, with the two light folding chairs, in different stripes, and the useful groundsheet that Esme had brought. Esme was fair-skinned, and got Mum to rub cream methodically into her shoulders and the white scoop of her back left bare by her swimsuit. Sometimes I saw to Mum myself, sometimes Esme said, “Let me do that.” Mum was a strong swimmer, quick as a knife, and was soon off past the rocks and out of sight.
There was an odd sharing or not sharing of talk between the three of us on the beach – me and Mum, Mum and Esme, sometimes Esme and me, rarely all three of us. I lay sunbathing, on my back then on my front, with, which I wasn’t really taking in. Esme chatted, in her forthright fashion, and Mum, sitting back in a stupor with her eyes closed, smiled distantly, and murmured in a way that seemed both intimate and evasive, as if conscious that I could hear.
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