A family dwelling in the past

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A House Unlocked is a memoir of Penelope Lively's family's 70-year occupation - from the 1920s to the 1990s - of Golsoncott, a house in the Brendon Hills in west Somerset. Lively's endeavour is to show this house as what she calls a "signifier for the century", a more or less unrealisable aim, for such significance is difficult to confer, particularly if the reader is notified beforehand that that is what is going to happen. Unfortunately for writers, it remains for readers to find significance in their observations, often in the place where the writer least expects it to be found.

In fact, A House Unlocked is full of significance, as the story of Lively's own experience of time, a story with which many readers, particularly readers of her generation, will profoundly identify. Lively was born in the early 1930s, of wealthy, uppermiddle-class English stock. She spent her childhood and the war years, in Egypt, where she was brought up by her nanny: her parents, like many parents of that era and class, appear to have been remote and formal figures whom Lively was permitted to see for an hour after tea.

Her visits to England, and to her grandparents' house, Golsoncott, were therefore charged with personal, emotional and aesthetic significance. It is interesting how often one will find in the lives of writers some experience of childhood exile or remove, which detonates a space in which the internal life may subsequently take root. Lively's apprehensions of landscape and culture, of material objects, of custom, of her relatives and the lives they lived, clearly were and remain vivid. The dramatic social changes that followed those war years meant that even after returning to England she never reconnected with the world of her grandparents. She went on to live a very different sort of life to theirs, as so many people did; lives which, though not unconventional, represented a real break from the private and public conventions of the past. It is this past that is so haunting, for while its houses, photographs and objects remain, its essence has entirely vanished.

Many of these changes, of course, Lively's grandmother and aunt (the artist Rachel Reckitt, who lived on at Golsoncott until her death) witnessed themselves: the disappearance of the servant class, changes in rural life and the landscape, the liberation of women and the consequent upheaval of social norms. Lively's grandmother didn't appear to think much of it all; but Lively herself found peace in this new world, with its possibilities of intimacy and self-expression. Her experience of marriage and motherhood was very different from her parents' and grandparents', and as she writes about these aspects of her life, the contrast cannot but make itself felt. I wondered whether, while writing this book, she re-examined the feelings that inspired it and found that they were not quite as she had thought. She begins with nostalgia, longing, homesickness; she ends by admitting gratitude for the forces of history that broke up that past and allowed her to make her own life.

I live not two miles from Golsoncott, so I went to have a look at it. The house, as houses are, was inscrutable. Proust has shown us the awe we retain for the things that have power over us in childhood: is it time itself or the landmarks of its passing that we mourn? I am not so sure as Lively that objects create a mnemonic system of memory, that they can "be made to bear witness". Their durability can sometimes remind us only of how things vanish. It is Lively's eloquence that is the witness here: in unlocking a house, she has instead unlocked herself.