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Автор Пенелопа Лайвли

PENELOPE LIVELY

The Road to Lichfield

Penguin Books

Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE ROAD TO LICHFIELD

Penelope Lively grew up in Egypt but settled in England after the war and took a degree in history at St Anne’s College, Oxford. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of PEN and the Society of Authors. She is married to Professor Jack Lively, has a daughter, a son and four grandchildren, and lives in Oxfordshire and London.

Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize; once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark. She later won the Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger in 1987. Her other novels include Passing On, shortlisted for the 1989 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award, City of the Mind, Cleopatra’s Sister and Heat Wave. Many of her books, including Going Back, which first appeared as a children’s book, and Oleander, Jacaranda, an autobiographical memoir of her childhood days in Egypt, are published by Penguin.

Penelope Lively has also written radio and television scripts and has acted as presenter for a BBC Radio 4 programme on children’s literature. She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award.

TITLES BY PENELOPE LIVELY IN PENGUIN

FICTION

Going Back

The Road to Lichfield

Treasures of Time

Judgement Day

Next to Nature, Art

Perfect Happiness

Corruption and Other Stories

According to Mark

Pack of Cards: Stories 1978-1986

Moon Tiger

Passing On

City of the Mind

Cleopatra’s Sister

Heat Wave

Beyond the Blue Mountains

Spiderweb

The Photograph

Making It Up

Consequences

Family Album

How It All Began

NON-FICTION

The Presence of the Past: An Introduction to Landscape History

Oleander Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived

A House Unlocked

For JACK

One

Anne Linton drove north to Lichfield through the morning. Berkshire gave way to Oxfordshire, Oxfordshire to Warwickshire, and Warwickshire to Staffordshire. A scum of insects gathered at the edge of the windscreen; the landscape lay misty and unreal at either side of the car, the road slicing through fields and villages as though it were of a different dimension, a different order of things.

From time to time towns offered themselves on signposts – Daventry 12, Stratford 8, Birmingham 17. They seemed like actors in the wings, and the landscape itself a palimpsest, suggesting another time, another place. Edgehill recalled the Civil War; Tam worth, lurking over to the right, had something Saxon about it, she seemed to remember. Her own past, too, waved a cheery hand from over the horizon, or the other side of a motorway interchange. In Stratford, once, on a wedding anniversary outing to a production of Much Ado she and Don had discussed on the banks of the Avon whether or not to conceive another child. And in Oxford – well, in Oxford of course a great deal more than that had happened. She had thought of that last night, planning her journey. Private and public memory, it seemed, were fused on the R. A. C. Route Guide.