The Hardy epigraph to Penelope Lively's children's classic of 1974, The House in Norham Gardens, points up a continual theme and preoccupation of this author: "I see the hands of the generations," Hardy wrote (in the poem 'Old Furniture'), "That owned each shiny familiar thing". Getting to grips with the passing of time, and patterns of continuity, are bound up in the most striking way with Penelope Lively's entire literary impulse, whether she's writing for children or adults, fiction or non-fiction. Now, after A Childhood Perceived - her engaging memoir concerning an English upbringing in Cairo - comes A House Unlocked, the house in question being Golsoncott in Somerset (fictionalised as Medleycott in the novel Going Back), which her grandparent had bought in 1923, and where she came to live as an observant and faintly bemused 12-year-old in 1945.
Not an ancient house - it was built around 1908, in the style of Lutyens - Golsoncott is presented here as a kind of "signifier of the century", responding in its own way to social change and upheaval, secretly recording the things that impinge on it. Not all of these were expected. What, for instance, has sedate, upper-middle-class Golsoncott to do with the Russian Revolution, or with nit-infested urchins from London's East End?
As far as the latter are concerned - it was simply that the house became a billet for wartime evacuees, providing sanctuary for a group of city children who were given the run of the garden and had Beatrix Potter read to them after tea. Six of these children subsequently got worked into a sampler created in 1946 by Penelope Lively's needlewoman grandmother, adding a topical touch to an essentially old-fashioned undertaking. The Golsoncott sampler is one of the objects - Hardy's "shiny familiar things" - that carries a whole range of associations and implications, and thereby lends itself to creative deconstruction. Others, "eerily charged with meaning", include a grand piano along with such bewildering items of equipment as a knife rest and a pair of grape scissors. The singling out of some significant heirlooms - "The Hall chest, the Photograph Albums and the Picnic Rug" - gives a shape to the book and enables the author to launch into a disquisition on domestic arrangements (say), on the redundant church building and its present uses, on gardening enthusiasm or on the British community in pre-revolutionary Moscow. But it is, inevitably, the great, inexorable changes of the 20th century that underpin the story of Golsoncott, with its ramifications, as social and family history converge. By the mid-century, for example, the unspoken social revolution had advanced sufficiently to allow "a girl from the southern gentry" to meet and marry a working-class boy, Jack Lively, from Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
The meeting-ground of this unlikely pair was Oxford, where "the clear blue air of higher education" had detatched them, productively, from "the assumptions and expectations" of their backgrounds. But the backgrounds remain, to be scrutinised and analysed; and with them Golsoncott, like the house in Norham Gardens, "packed with events and experiences and conversations", reverberating back through all the years of the century. Always subtle and illuminating, A House Unlocked provides a further outlet for that highly developed "sense of relevance and connections" which informs all of Penelope Lively's work, and makes it so invaluable and intriguing.
Patricia Craig is an author and critic