Summer's end

Last Tuesday getting back to work in our village, or I should say township, meant an election for the town supervisor and the select men and all the other offices which retain their old colonial names.

Of course, like everybody else in reach of a television or a radio set, we fretted about South Africa and the president's coming fight for a new tax system and the alarmingly widespread use of drugs among the baseball stars and other matters of chronic national interest.

But getting back to normal in this quiet part of Long Island, a hundred miles from New York City, meant whether to increase the charge for overnight boats at the marinas and the parlous low state during our long summer drought of the aquifers which are the source of our water supply. But the most dramatic difference between our summer life and life anytime after Labor Day is the happy fact that the summer folks have gone.

Summer folks is an old American phrase that summer folks don't care to use. It belittles or, as we now say, downgrades them. What are summer folks? Well, first let's say what they're not. They're not the hoards of people who in most temperate countries invade seaside resorts especially and spend a couple of weeks there.

Summer folks are not the inhabitants of family holiday camps which are so much more of a British institution than an American that I doubt they exist here at all. Though I hasten to say the entire 3,000-miles stretch of this continent abounds in summer in children's camps, the normal two-month summer habitat for middle-class children whose parents can afford to buy the required outfits, blankets, raincoats, shirts, swimming suits, play clothes, extra shoes, underwear etc. etc. and then bundle them off to join their classmates at a bus depot or an airport. Used to be the railway station, but today the railroad is practically an anachronism as rare as the American soda fountain. We must talk sometime about the sad disappearance of that splendid institution.

Well, to narrow the definition of summer folks down further to what they're not, I ought to mention that this continent also abounds in summer camps for special types of enthusiast – tennis camps for teenagers, for full-blown adults, golf camps, swimming camps and what we rudely call fat farms, known in other English-speaking countries as rest centres or the Meadows Retreat or some other flutey euphemism for a place where you go or are sent by your mate to lose the spare tyre round the middle.

All these determined holiday makers are not summer folks. I thought I'd look up the origin of the phrase in the American equivalent of the great Oxford English Dictionary. It is in four fat volumes, took 30 years to compile. It is a dictionary of American-English on historical principles done on the same lines as the Oxford with every entry noting its first, historically first, appearance in print and on into our own time with any progressive or retrograde change in meaning. I was quite confident that summer folks would be there.

Amazingly it isn't, but we see its origins in 'Summer Boarder', an 1872 entry, 'one who boards in a country place during the summer'. And, immediately following, 'Summer Cottage, a cottage usually in the country occupied during the summer'. A second quotation of 'summer boarder' brings us with a bang to what we once called the nitty-gritty and now call the bottom line: '1887. The summer boarder trade will yield the highest amount of profit'. That is a fact attested to in thousands of small towns in the mountains, by the lakes, along the coast shelf of America, especially on the east coast from Maine down through the Carolinas.

Since a hundred years ago or a little more, it has been in such places that you could find the summer folks. It was the railroad that drastically changed the summer habits of the bourgeois middle class. They used to desert the insufferable heat of the eastern cities by going off just before 4 July in carriages to some cool valley outside town, where, when they were young, they boarded in a guest house. When they got a little richer, they rented a cottage and when they were richer still, they bought a cottage and the wife decamped there for July and August and the husband commuted – another American word – at the weekends.

The word 'cottage' covers a variety of shelters. To most people, a cottage then, as now, was just that, a small nest, an abandoned farmhouse perhaps, a simple place for simple summer pleasures, but the men who in the 1880s and '90s made new fortunes in tin and copper and coke and iron and the railroads, they also discovered the pleasure of having for themselves a summer house, a retreat by the seashore. And they built them. Huge mansions in the English style, the French style, at Newport in Rhode Island. They called them cottages. Cottages with 37 bedrooms, stables, grand dining-rooms, small dining-rooms, ballrooms, hothouses and spacious gardens.

The rather less wealthy, but wealthy enough, took the train out 90 miles along the south shore of Long Island and there, by the Atlantic Ocean and the dunes, they, too, built sturdy houses which they inhabited for the two months that separate Independence Day from Labor Day. They were the first summer folks, so-called subsequently and forever by the farmers, the builders, the carpenters, the shopkeepers, the schoolteachers and so on who are the permanent residents of such small towns as Southampton, Westhampton, Quogue – all towns facing the Atlantic, along a fork of land that has the ocean on one side and great Peconic Bay on the other.

By the way, it was here that three prosperous gentlemen had built summer homes but, in the early spring of 1889, they were off in a holiday in France and at Biarritz, they came on a very strange sight – a long, rolling stretch of land, cropped along what looked like short parade grounds that led to small green surfaces, cropped or mown more finely still. They ran into a young Scot, one Willie Dunn, who was playing an odd sort of game across this land. He told them it was called 'the gawf'. He took them to the edge of a chasm. He took a remarkable implement in his hand, dropped a little white ball and struck the ball over the chasm to a bright, green surface about 125 yards away.

The Messrs Vanderbilt, Meade and Cryder were enchanted. They promptly hired Willie Dunn to come over, cross the Atlantic, come to the south shore of Long Island and trim or shape or ravage or whatever was necessary to build a course for the gawf. And Willie came in the late spring of 1891, surveyed the 4,000 acres that Mr Vanderbilt had quietly purchased and, with the help of 150 Indians from the nearby Shinnecock reservation, he cut down the blueberry bushes, turned Indian burial grounds into obstacles or scooped them into bunkers and, in less than three months, had created a 12-hole golf course which became, a little later on, the first 18-hole golf course in America.

And nothing would do for Mr Vanderbilt than that this memento, or splendid imitation of a Scottish links course, should have a clubhouse and it should be designed, and was, by America's most fashionable architect of the time. None other than the brilliant and dashing bachelor, Stanford White, who had designed the great arch in New York's Washington Square but, more to the point, had built the vast Vanderbilt cottage in Newport.

Veteran listeners may have their memories stirred and recall hazily a talk, some years ago, in which I identified Stanford White as the lover of a ravishingly beautiful young girl named Evelyn Nesbit. A year or two went by and she married the heir to a railroad fortune, one Harry K.Thaw. Came a time when Mr Stanford White designed a New York roof garden theatre and on the opening night, Mr White went from his penthouse and sat at his own reserved table.

Present for the opening, too, were Mr and Mrs Harry K. Thaw and just as the chorus was performing the last scene in a foam of petticoats, young Mr Thaw got up, threaded his way to White's table, took out a pistol and fired three times at Stanford White's head. That was the mortal end of him and whenever I pass the Shinnecock course – the clubhouse rises on hill, fronting on the usual two-lane road – I think of Stanford White. Next summer, about 20,000 other people may think of him for Shinnecock is where the United States Open Golf Championship is to be played.

Well, after the Vanderbilts and his cronies, lesser people followed and, on the principle enunciated in that old tag about the enumerable French aristocracy, little fleas have lesser fleas upon their backs to bite 'em and lesser fleas have lesser fleas, and so, ad infinitum. The summer cottage of every size and type became the thing. Where once financiers built their summer mansions, their lawyers followed and then small businessmen and doctors and on and on, down or up to actresses and theatrical agents, novelists and bankers and on and on. People, I'm sure you've noticed, tend to follow like sheep the fashions of their betters.

Today the south shore of Long Island, the southern fork at the very end, is cluttered with more rich and beautiful and pretentious and successful smart alecks in every line of business. Between 4 July and 2 September, the roads were as cluttered as if Long Island's nuclear power plant had sprung a leak.

Well, last weekend, I drove round the bay, down from the comparative haven of our north fork, the potato and the corn fields and our 32 vineyards, I drove down and round and along the south shore and all was calm and still. The summer folks had all gone and the year-round inhabitants could breathe again. Good riddance, is what most of them seem to say from the new look on their faces, but... but and alas, the summer folks, as the dictionary said, yield the highest amount of profit.

'There's nothing,' said an old man to me, 'nothing as sweet as the other guy's money. But, now, we can live by ourselves to ourselves.'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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