1962: a volcanic year

By Matthew Engel

On a cool English summer’s day in July 1962, a young middle-class couple called Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting were married in Oxford and drove to begin their honeymoon by the Dorset coast. The wedding was conventional in an era when convention was followed rigorously. What happened on the wedding night, however, departed from the norms. It was what did not happen that was so unusual. Through a combination of gaucheness on Edward’s part, naivety on Florence’s and an excess of English reticence from them both, they failed to complete the physical procedure that customarily follows a marriage, with devastating consequences.

Edward and Florence (born circa 1940) did not exist as such. They are the creations of Ian McEwan (born 1948) and the central figures of his much-admired short novel “On Chesil Beach” (published 2007), which is how we know the precise sequence of events on this private occasion. It is the kind of story in which no detail is an accident, and that includes the year in which it was set. When I phoned to ask about it, McEwan seemed quite pleased that someone had noticed.