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,
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
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