The House in Norham Gardens by Penelope Lively

First published: 1974

Type of work: Psychological realism/moral tale

Themes: Coming-of-age, family, death, the supernatural, and social issues

Time of work: January to late February, in the early 1970’s

Recommended Ages: 13-15

Locale: 40 Norham Gardens, North Oxford, England

Principal Characters:

• Clare Mayfield, a bright, loving, sensible yet sensitive fourteen-year-old girl
• Aunt Susan Mayfield, age eighty, white-haired and withered, but still intellectually astute and wryly humorous
• Aunt Anne Mayfield, age seventy-eight, frail but also still sharp, witty, and fond of reading the newspapers into a muddle
• Mrs. Hedges, the kindly live-out housekeeper
• Maureen Cooper, a lodger, a kindhearted twenty-eight-year-old woman unhappy with her single state but determinedly virtuous
• John Sempebwa, another lodger, a Ugandan anthropology student
• Cousin Margaret, Clare’s only other surviving relative, busy and fussy but concerned

The Story

Clare Mayfield is feeling oppressed both by the exceptionally cold, snowy winter in Oxford and by the sense that nothing is happening in her life. “We just wait,” she thinks, and goes about her routine of bicycling to and from her public (what Americans would call “private”) girls’ school, doing her schoolwork and caring for her beloved, aged grandaunts. The Mayfield home is a living museum, a nineteen-room white elephant housing not only its present occupants but also a strong sense of past family members, especially Clare’s great-grandparents. Evidence of her great-grandfather’s life as a prominent anthropologist are all around: Spears decorate the book-lined walls; family albums, letters, and diaries cram the desks; and the attic is the repository of trunks full of both the fashionable clothing of other eras and the booty of anthropological field trips.

Searching the trunks for blankets one day, Clare finds a tribal shield, a trophy of Great-Grandfather’s well-chronicled 1905 expedition to Papua New Guinea to study an isolated Stone Age tribe. Clare is strangely compelled by the shield with its vivid, stylized red and yellow markings that depict a fierce face, and she sets it up by the attic window. That night, she dreams the first of a series of dreams about the tribe that gradually encroach on her daily life, making her fearful and disoriented.

Soon, Clare’s increasingly frightening dream and visionary encounters with spectral, small brown tribesmen, who begin to appear to her in familiar Oxford settings of the last seventy years as well as in the garden and the house, lead to a noticeable deterioration in both her physical health and her ability to concentrate on her daily routines. Her struggle to understand the sense of unfulfilled obligation she feels toward the tribesmen is hampered by her increasingly complicated task of caring for Aunt Susan and Aunt Anne, for whom she must shop and fetch the harassed National Health doctor. Clare begins to falter in her schoolwork, so important now that she is preparing for the O-level examinations. She also begins to withdraw from her school friends and their sociable adolescent activities; instead, she becomes more and more absorbed in her search to discover her duty to the phantasmal tribesmen. She methodically researches the shield, or tamburan, in her great-grandfather’s notes and at the nearby Pitt Rivers natural history museum, and discovers it to have been totemic, a kind of family portrait, generally hung on the walls of tribal huts. Without conscious understanding, these primitive Papua New Guinean tribesmen had produced these symbols of their vital connection to their dead ancestors. Their lives shaped by animism, they had lived waiting for death, regarding it merely as a demarcation point between the narrow, dangerous confines of physical existence and the richer promise of afterlife. On one research trip to Pitt Rivers, Clare meets John Sempebwa, a courtly young Ugandan anthropology student who is sympathetic to her urgent need to understand. John shortly becomes 40 Norham Gardens’ second lodger, just when Clare comes to feel that the ghostly tribesmen want the tamburan back.

On stage during a school production of Macbeth, an overwrought Clare experiences a flash of revelation. Feeling a strong sense of empathy for the guilt-ridden Macbeth, who is alone beset by Banquo’s ghost, she bolts for home and puts the tamburan outside, ready for its rightful owners to claim it. An indignant Mrs. Hedges retrieves it; increasingly disturbed by Clare’s erratic behavior, she sends the girl to the doctor and keeps her home from school. Subsequently, an enjoyable outing with John to London and a solitary bus trip to a rural church to study family memorial plaques (the European form of tamburan) both fail to ease Clare’s mind.

Arriving home one day after a visit to an ailing Mrs. Hedges, Clare panics when she finds the house empty; cycling furiously back to the housekeeper’s home, she has an accident that hospitalizes her with a broken arm and a concussion. In an anesthetic-prompted dream, Clare finally encounters the tribesmen in their present village; reconciled to and integrated into twentieth century life, they reject the proffered tamburan, for they seem willingly to have forgotten their ancestral past. A recovered, newly serene Clare finds spring outside the hospital and tranquillity at home, where she resolves to wait for the rest of her life to unfold.

Context

Penelope Lively began her literary career as a writer of books for children. The Ghost of Thomas Kempe (1973), her fourth children’s novel and winner of the Carnegie Medal, stood as the first of a long series of Lively’s books, including The House in Norham Gardens (1974) and A Stitch in Time (1976), that concern the interaction of past and present through supernatural means or beings that often make their presences felt through the minds of sensitive, receptive children. That same preoccupation shapes Lively’s later adult novels. Because Lively writes with wit and gentle humor, she tempers the often hostile or threatening atmosphere that can permeate stories where the supernatural is a force, as in such gothic stories as Emily Brontes Wuthering Heights (1847), Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), and even Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843), or the more recent and sensational popular American children’s work, Florence Randall’s The Watcher in the Woods (1976).

While definitely disturbed by her feverish mental state and her dream visitors, Clare maintains her practicality, for the most part, and above all her ability to laugh at herself and to see the humorous ironies of her situation. Life at Norham Gardens maintains an even, civilized tone; the presences in the huge old house are generally benign, and the house itself is home despite its size. The ragged garden sends a comforting message in the shape of roses blooming beneath the snow, reminding Clare and the reader of the majestic cycle of life.