May Hill

When Sarah Sala was eleven years old her parents took her to the Cheltenham Festival in Gloucestershire. Though it was March, damp and chilly, Sarah insisted that they climb May Hill. Her mother, who felt a cold coming on and wanted to attend a piano recital, declined, but her well-read father was all for it. As they began the ascent, he recited a verse from Ivor Gurney: May Hill that Gloucester dwellers 'gainst every sunset see. Sarah said she liked the rhythm but there was something odd about it. Her scholarly father, a lecturer in Romance Languages, had the knack of being droll and pedantic at once. He told Sarah the oddity was because of Gurney's outlandish sentence structure. "It's Teutonic because you have to wait so long for the verb." His own family was Italian, not German. Sarah's Sala grandparents had emigrated from Milan before the war. Her other grandparents, the Jewish Blumfelds, were also an immigrant family. They arrived two generations before the Salas. As for Sarah's parents, both were thoroughly English, right down to their inoffensive agnosticism, but Sarah may have been the most English of all.