Date Posted:13:45:50 02/16/08 Sat Author:Lorna Schofield (OK) Subject: on chesil beach
I kept being thrown during on Chesil Beach because everything was telling me it was 1912 rather than 1962.
The name Florence; the general air of restriction and repression; the gentility of the hotel, the absolute sexual innocence of the couple.
Perhaps this was deliberate, but over and over again I was imagining the woman in long skirts and pinned-up hair and the man in braces and collarless shirt and then - oops - she and he are in early 60s garb. It jarred, rather.
I suppose you wanted to underline the fact that there was so much restriction and repression until relatively recently...Perhaps if you had called the girl Angela or Susan or something more of that era, I wouldn't have drifted so far into the past!
