House Unlocked Book

This is such an interesting book! Penelope Lively is one of my favourite British authors, and this book is woven around the family home in Somerset that her grandparents bought in 1923. She uses it to show how apparently unchanging buildings and landscapes can reveal both momentous events in history and changes in technology from trains to needlecraft.

As readers of her fiction know, Lively has a discerning eye and a pleasing awareness of the inequities fostered by class systems, but she is also generous in her appraisal of those who hold different views. She herself is agnostic, and her much-loved grandmother was staunch C of E, but Lively recognises the social and cohesive value of the traditions of church-going in villages, and mourns the loss of churches as churches, as attendances decline.

She tells us how her grandmother's needlework records the presence of six bewildered evacuees during the Blitz and how the muddle and misery caused by that was based on mercifully wrong pre-war projections about likely bomb damage by the Luftwaffe. These projections drew on data from bomb damage in the Great War - and seen in that context, the evacuations for all their faults, were prudent. Some children suffered terribly because of ill-matched billets and the chasm between the social classes but there were also benefits for some of the slum children whose health and habits shocked even the poor in rural England. Lively's own husband was lucky: he was recognised as bright by the retired school teacher with whom he was billeted, coached to a scholarship and went on to be an academic.

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