‘Hello, there. I didn’t know you were keen on gardening.’
‘I’m not,’ said Clare, ‘I just felt it seemed to need arranging. How do you tell which are weeds and which are plants?’
‘If it’s strong-growing and looks at home,’ said Mrs Rider, ‘you can be sure it’s a weed. As often as not.’ She peered over the wall. ‘That’s a Michaelmas daisy, by your foot. You want to leave that. How’s the old ladies?’
‘Very well, thank you. Aunt Anne’s cold is much better.’
‘That’s good,’ said Mrs Rider. ‘Inconvenient for them, though, that big house. All the stairs.’
‘Not really. They like it. They’ve lived there a long time.’
‘That’s a point,’ said Mrs Rider vaguely. She gave Clare a sharp look and said, ‘You’re looking better yourself, I’d say. Very peaky I thought you were last time I saw you. Been overdoing it at school, I daresay.’
‘Yes. I expect that’s what it was.’
The garden, after an hour or so, did look neater. She gave some water to the tree, which seemed to be settling down, and went inside, feeling pleased with herself. There was something else to be done that she had been saving up for the right moment, when she felt like doing it, and now all of a sudden the right moment seemed to have come. She put on a coat, changed her shoes, which had got muddy in the garden, and went up to the attic. She came downstairs with the tamburan tucked under her arm.
She met John at the front door, coming in.
‘Hello. Where are you taking your shield?’
‘I’m going to give it to the museum.’
‘Ah. Won’t you miss it, though? You were so interested in it.’
‘I think I’ve finished with it,’ said Clare. ‘Or it’s finished with me. It would be safer in a museum, if it’s very special.’
‘You are probably right.’
‘If it can’t be where it belongs, then a museum is the best place.’
John went upstairs, and Clare walked down Norham Gardens and past the Parks. Everything shone. The grass was brightly green and the earth a sticky brown and the melting snow had left a wet sheen over everything. The road was black and gleaming and the parked cars glittered in the sun. Clare carried the tamburan face outwards under her arm but nobody looked at it, and this gave her an elusive feeling of the same thing having happened once before, somewhere else. Passing the two or three Victorian houses that survived among the new buildings beside the Parks she had another, equally evasive, memory of having seen them, also, under other circumstances. Both impressions occupied her mind until she reached the entrance to the museum, and then she forgot all about them.
To walk into a museum carrying under your arm an object which clearly belongs there is a disconcerting experience. Like, Clare thought, shoplifting in reverse. She walked by the various people in the Natural History Museum feeling acutely uncomfortable: the student on a camp stool, drawing the blue whale’s skeleton, and the clutch of small boys staring at pickled jellyfish, seemed to follow her with their eyes as she hurried past. As for Prince Albert, Darwin and the rest, on their marble plinths …
Once inside the Pitt Rivers, she anticipated any attack that might come by marching straight up to the attendant. She had not rehearsed what she would say and heard herself being embarrassingly incoherent. The attendant looked sideways at the tamburan, with surprise, and then at her, with doubt.
‘You want to see someone about giving something to the museum?’
Clare nodded. The attendant disappeared for a moment through a door into some private, inner world of the museum and came back with another man.
He examined the tamburan. ‘Very nice. Lovely. But where on earth did you get it?’
Clare explained.
‘How extraordinary,’ said the man. ‘Of course we’d like it, though. It can go with the rest of the Mayfield Collection.’ He ran his hand over the surface of the tamburan. ‘How very bright it is. In better condition than our own, really. It could have been made yesterday. Has it been stored with special care?’
‘No. Just in a trunk in the attic.’
‘Really? Well – many thanks. Would you like to wait while I write out a receipt. What did you say your name was?’
‘Clare Mayfield.’
‘We could label it “Donated by Miss Clare Mayfield”.’
Clare, going hot and red about the face, said, ‘Thank you very much.’ The man was looking at the tamburan again. He held it in front of him, with both hands, and looked at it with detachment, like a scientist observing remote forms of life under a microscope. ‘Extraordinarily powerful images, these things,’ he said. ‘New Guinea’s not really my field, but one can’t help being fascinated by them. Your great-grandfather acquired it himself, you say?’
‘Yes.’
‘Interesting. The tribes were usually very reluctant to part with them. They had a deep magical significance, you see.’
‘I know,’ said Clare. ‘They wanted it back for a long time and then things happened to them and they didn’t any more. They forgot why they’d needed them.’
The man stared at her, perplexed. ‘What?’
Clare went red again. ‘Nothing. Sorry. I think I’d better go home now.’
‘Well,’ said the man, ‘many thanks.’ They smiled at each other, awkwardly, and the man went away into his private part of the museum again, taking the tamburan with him. Clare watched it go without emotion. She thought that she might come to visit it when it had been arranged somewhere, in a glass case, or on the stairs with the others, and then again she might not. There would be no particular need to, because she was never likely to forget it, though it had lost the urgency it once had for her. It would be rather fun, though, to see her name on a label, if that man had meant what he said.
Leaving the museum, she remembered that the last time she had gone home from there she had taken John with her. He had met Aunt Susan, and eaten digestive biscuits in front of the fire. It had been snowing and he had been a stranger. Now, the sun was out and John was someone she seemed to have known for a very long time. People you like seem always to have been there: you forget about the time when they were not. She walked back along Parks Road under a blue sky that was both above and below her at the same time – overhead, fringed with trees and houses, and underneath, plunging below the road, the same landscape in reverse shining up from the puddles. Safely tethered to the road, she walked in the middle of this circular world, looking down into the water and enjoying the oddness of her own reflection, foreshortened, feet first, upside down in a floating mirror. It reminded her, for some reason, of the chameleon in the zoo, but its bifocal view of the world had seemed, at the time, unbearably disconcerting. Now, from a firm standpoint in the centre of things, it was not. She stamped in a puddle, childishly, for the fun of shattering sky, trees and houses and watching them reassemble.
In the evening she sat in the library with the aunts, at the heart of the silent house. John and Maureen had both gone out. Sitting by the fire, Clare thought of the rooms of the houses, stacked around her, empty and yet full. Maureen’s room, and John’s, would be full of their possessions, for as long as they lived here, and, thus, of them. Photographs, clothes, books. When, in time, they went away, would anything remain of them here, as so much remained of Great-grandfather and Great-grandmother and the whole long lives of the aunts? Not really, Clare thought, except for me, because I knew them. Where they will be, in a peculiar way, is inside my head, but I’m the only person who’ll know about that. All the same, that’s important – going on inside someone else’s head.
‘Lost in thought,’ said Aunt Susan, ‘as usual. How is the arm?’
‘Tickling.’
There was a flurry of newspaper as Aunt Anne tried to arrange the page she wanted in a satisfactory reading position. Aunt Susan sighed. ‘The only thing,’ she said, ‘well, one of the only things – I have always held against Anne is her daily massacre of newspapers. In all my life, I have
hardly ever picked up a clean, uncrumpled newspaper.’
‘It’s a small martyrdom,’ said Aunt Anne, ‘compared to most.’ They grinned at each other over Clare’s head.
‘And you?’ said Aunt Susan. ‘Child – Clare – What are your private grievances?’
‘Making my bed. School dinner. The French teacher. Getting up. Er – Latin. The way the bathroom door won’t shut properly.’
‘Some of those will clear up with the passage of time. The bathroom door has been like that for twenty years: one learns to live with it.’
‘I wonder,’ said Clare, ‘if this house will be here when I’m old. If I’ll live in it.’
‘I don’t imagine so for a moment. The whole place will have been razed to the ground to make way for a housing estate.’
‘Maybe not,’ said Aunt Anne. ‘You never know. The road may come to be considered highly desirable. Preserved for posterity.’
‘Either way, you won’t need it. You will have furnished your own life, with other places and other things.’
‘I shall keep the photographs from the drawing room,’ said Clare, ‘and the clothes in the trunks in the attic, and the portraits in the dining room, and …’
‘My dear child,’ said Aunt Susan, ‘you can’t carry a museum round with you. Neither will you need to. What you need, you will find you already have to hand – of that I’ve not the slightest doubt. You are a listener. It is only those who have never listened who find themselves in trouble eventually.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it is extremely dull,’ said Aunt Susan tartly, ‘to grow old with nothing inside your head but your own voice. Tedious, to put it mildly.’
The fire heaved, flared up for a moment, and settled itself again. The logs hissed. Outside, a car went past. How odd, Clare thought, to sit here talking about me as though I were another person. Someone quite different. She tried to project herself forward in time to meet her, this unknown woman with her name and her face, and failed. She walked away, the woman, a stranger, familiar and yet unreachable. The only thing you could know about her for certain was that all this would be part of her: this room, this conversation, the aunts.
The aunts. Aunt Anne, seventy-eight: Aunt Susan, eighty-one. I can’t make it stop at now, Clare thought, and you shouldn’t want to, not really.
She looked at them, intently, at their faces and their hands and the shape of them. I’m learning them by heart, she thought, that’s what I’m doing, that’s all I can do, only that.
1933 Born 17 March in Cairo, Egypt
1945 Returns to England and goes to boarding school in Sussex, then St Anne’s College, Oxford, reading Modern History
1957 Marries the academic Jack Lively, with whom she will have a son and a daughter
1970 Achieves her first success in children’s fiction with the publication of Astercote and goes on to publish more than twenty books for children, a similar number for adults, several non-fiction titles, radio and television scripts, and reviews and articles in various newspapers and journals
1973 The Ghost of Thomas Kempe wins the Carnegie Medal, awarded annually by children’s librarians
1974 The House in Norham Gardens is published
1976 A Stitch in Time wins the Whitbread Children’s Book Award
1977 The Road to Lichfield is published, her first novel for adults, which reaches the shortlist for the Booker Prize
1987 Moon Tiger, a novel for adults, wins the Booker Prize
1984 According to Mark is published, and also shortlisted for the Booker Prize
1989 Appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to literature
2001 Appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE)
2012 Appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE)
2016 Lives in Islington, London, and has six grandchildren
Interesting Facts
Penelope Lively’s early years were spent in Egypt where her father worked at the National Bank of Egypt. She was an only child, educated at home in a big house just outside Cairo. She once said, ‘Obviously it was a childhood with enormous opportunities for imagination. I spent long hours just playing alone, building stories in my mind from the books I read, especially stories from Greek and Roman mythology.’
Where Did the Story Come From?
Norham Gardens actually exists today. It is a residential road in North Oxford, England, one end of which is directly opposite St Anne’s College, where Penelope Lively was a student at the university in the 1950s. The Pitt Rivers Museum, which now contains over half a million archaeological and ethnographic objects from all over the world, is within walking distance. Although the story is set in a fictional number 40 Norham Gardens, the background setting would have been very familiar to the author.
Guess Who?
A ‘A good grounding in the Sciences is right for a girl.’
B ‘In this house we preserve an older, finer way of life. Welcome to nineteen thirty-six.’
C ‘There is a rather regrettable tendency nowadays to fence people off according to age.’
D ‘I’m not getting involved in one of your conversations where everything sounds back to front, or I’ll be here all night.’
E ‘I am doing my thesis on witchcraft practice among the Baganda.’
ANSWERS:
A) Aunt Susan
B) Clare
C) Aunt Anne
D) Mrs Hedges
E) John Sempebwa
Words Glorious Words!
Lots of words have several different meanings – here are a few you’ll find in this Puffin book. Use a dictionary or look them up online to find other definitions.
tamburan ceremonial shield made by tribes in Papua New Guinea
anthropomorphism the attribution of human characteristics to a god, animal or object
culture the ideas, customs and social behaviour of a particular people or society
stream of consciousness a person’s thoughts expressed as a continuous flow
texture the feel, appearance or consistency of a surface or a substance
ritual a religious or solemn ceremony consisting of a series of actions regularly followed
Quiz
Thinking caps on – Let’s see how much you can remember! Answers are on the next page. (No peeking!)
1 In what year is The House in Norham Gardens set?
a) At the turn of the last century
b) 1936
c) In the 1950s
d) 1973
2 What was the profession of Clare’s great-grandfather?
a) Explorer
b) Anthropologist
c) Steamship captain
d) Photographer
3 What was the name of Great-grandfather’s expedition?
a) The Cooke-Daniels Expedition
b) The Sanderson-Hemmings Expedition
c) The Port Moresby Expedition
d) The Pitt Rivers Expedition
4 Where does John Sempebwa’s family come from?
a) Swaffham in Norfolk
b) A village in New Guinea
c) A village in Uganda
d) Headington in Oxford
5 Why was Clare in such a hurry when she fell off her bike?
a) She wanted to get home before it snowed
b) She didn’t want to miss the post
c) She wanted to reach the Pitt Rivers Museum before closing
d) She was desperate for help, having found the house deserted
ANSWERS:
1) d
2) b
3) a
4) c
5) d
New Year’s Day was celebrated as a public holiday for the first time.
Sweden won the Eurovision Song Contest with ‘Waterloo’, performed by ABBA.
Five previously all-male Colleges of the University of Oxford admitted women undergraduates for the first time
The final episode of Monty Python’s Flyi
ng Circus was broadcast on BBC2.
John le Carré’s novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was first published.
Did You Know?
Augustus Henry Lane Fox was a Yorkshireman, born in 1827, but it was only when he inherited the Cranborne Chase estate in Dorset from his relative Henry Pitt, Baron Rivers in 1880 that he adopted the surname Pitt Rivers, in honour of his benefactor.
Despite pursuing an army career, Pitt Rivers wasn’t much of a traveller. In fact, his massive collection of objects from around the world was acquired mainly from auctions, antique dealers and private sales.
The Larmer Tree Gardens, near Tollard Royal in Wiltshire, were created by Pitt Rivers in 1880 for ‘public enlightenment and entertainment’. Many of the original Victorian buildings still survive and a music and arts festival has been held there every year since 1991.
Puffin Writing Tip
The weather affects everyone’s mood, so use it to add richness to your writing!
If you have enjoyed The House in Norham Gardens you may like to read Back Home by Michelle Magorian in which Rusty returns to her family in England at the end of the Second World War.
Michelle Magorian
BACK HOME
CHAPTER TWO
Rusty was standing in the crowd on the quayside, when suddenly she found herself being hugged tightly by a woman in her thirties, dressed in green. After a few seconds Rusty realized that the woman was her mother. She was smaller and thinner than she had remembered, and her hair was now cut short. Rusty couldn’t help staring at the woman’s face. It was the first time in five years that she had seen it. For a moment it seemed as if they had never parted.
‘Hi,’ she said.
‘Hello.’