I fancy this excellent woman, sitting on the platform to watch the trains go homewards, and yearning for the day to come when she will take a seat in one of them, disclosed a secret which many of us share, but few of us have the courage to confess. She was bored by her holiday. It was her annual Purgatory,* her time of exile by the alien waters of Babylon.* There she sat while the commonplaces of her home life, her comfortable bed, the mysteries of her larder, the gossip of her neighbours, the dusting of the front parlour, the trials of shopping, her good man’s going and returning, the mending of the children’s stockings, and all the little somethings-and-nothings that made up her daily round, assumed a glamour and a pathos that familiarity had deadened. She had to go away from home to discover it again. She had to get out of her rut in order to find that she could not be happy anywhere else. Then she could say with Touchstone, “So this is the forest of Arden: well, when I was at home I was in a better place.”*
It does not follow that her holiday was a failure. It was a most successful holiday. The main purpose of a holiday is to make us home-sick.
From ‘Many Furrows’ (1924), a selection of essays by Alfred George Gardiner (1865-1946).
* In the traditional doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, Purgatory is the name for that place or state into which the souls of the dead immediately pass, and where they are purified from or suffer punishment for their sins. The word tends to be used for a cleansing and temporary kind of hell.
* A reference to Psalm 137. After the conquest by Babylon early in the sixth century BC, the nobility of Jerusalem were deported to Babylon. When curious locals asked to hear a Hebrew song or two, the exiles, so far from home, were thrown into great distress.
* Touchstone is a character in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, a court jester.