2023 - 1970’s Immersion Reading Challenge

A Stitch in Time by Penelope Lively (1976; 2016 ed.) 221 pages.

NOT ON THE ACCELERATED READING (AR) LIST!

Eleven-year-old Maria Foster is a little bit intuitive and can see and feel things at times…spiritually. A stitch in time refers to a one hundred year old 1865 sampler that was started by a 10-year-old girl named, Harriet, but for some unknown reason, finished by Harriet’s older sister. It depicted the house Maria Foster and her family were currently vacationing in on the coast at Lyme Regis, three hours from their home in London. It also had a swing and the ilet tree that Maria sits in every day to think about things. This sampler helps to reaffirm some of the things she felt, like the sound of a creaking swing when they first arrived, which she found later on in the story. Or, the little dog that was barking, which had died a hundred years earlier in one of the landslides. But, it did not confirm the death of Harriet, as she believed in her heart.

Although, I found the story itself to be extremely slow, I thought the author had pretty good character development in Maria. Being an only child, a bit reclusive and lonely, and being a bit intuitive, she was like an old soul in a child’s body. This I can relate to, although I’m not an only child. I am the middle child. I’m so reflective on the past, that, at times, I do forget to laugh and just have fun in life, just like Maria. And like Maria, I was, and sometimes still am, misunderstood in the way I think and the things I say and the things I do.

NOW, FOR MY RANT ABOUT ATHEISM PRESENTED IN THIS STORY

Why did the author have to go there? To trash the Bible and God’s Word? This was a great little story, which would have been perfectly fine without putting her two cents in discrediting God and His Words. I was instantly pissed and it did sway my review of the book. If you are a Christian, you might reconsider allowing your young child, with their impressionable minds, to read this.

P. 88: “Noah’s Ark isn’t true at all,” said Maria, with sudden illumination. “Course not,” said Martin. “It’s all a load of rubbish.”

Maria then makes a comment about how it seemed someone was playing around with things, as time went on, just to see what would work and what wouldn’t. Martin called it evolution, something they learned in school. He said things changed to adapt to their environment. They don’t just die off. (p. 89)

I wish the author would have left out this section altogether because now I have to put my two cents in regarding this children’s book.

The Bible makes it clear, that God created things to reproduce after their own kind. In Genesis 1:

11 The God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: see-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so.

12 The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.

21 So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.

24 And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so.

25 God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according tot heir kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.

26 The God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them run over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created hm; male and female he created them.

28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase n number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

I don’t believe in evolution at all. You either believe in God, or you don’t. That’s what it boils down to.

There may be slight changes from one earlier animal to the exact same kind of animal today…but they are still the same animal. Changes in environment can change DNA, or even breeding can change DNA, but never a change to a different species. Plants and trees can be propagated to grow several types of fruit on a tree, or pollenated to grow desired different traits or to get rid of weak traits. The truth is scientists have never, ever found, or proven, an instance where one animal is now a different animal, or one plant is now a different plant, or one fruit is now a different fruit. Humans were never once fish or apes. Show me! Never proven! There…rant over, and sorry I had to go there! ( )

I'm trying to read books with lighter themes during the current emergency. This is a classic children's mystery story written and set in the 1970s. Maria Foster is an 11 year old girl on holiday with her parents in Lyme Regis, staying in old Victorian house, where she hears a swing creaking and a dog barking that no one else can hear. She gets to hear more about Harriet, a girl of her own age, who lived in the house in the nineteenth century, and gets increasingly confused between the events of the two ages, though it isn't entirely clear whether this is a timeslip or a vivid imagination. The story is well written and describes the environment of Lyme Regis, a town I love, very well, particularly the fossils in the rocks, which prompt Maria to see the past as being preserved in the present and, in a sense, still continuing alongside contemporary events. Some of the experiences and feelings of a family holiday in the 1970s at the seaside rang true to me as a child of that decade (though we went elsewhere and my visits to Lyme Regis have all been in my middle age)! ( )

Lovely, quiet novel perhaps more suitable for adults than children, though introspective, shy children would find a kindred spirit in Maria. The setting comes alive in Ms. Lively's vivid descriptions. I would love to visit the seaside town of Lyme Regis and see the many fossils. ( )

Well, I enjoyed this. ?�But, even though I was a quiet and sensitive child, I would not have done so forty years ago, when I was Maria's age. ?áI don't know what child would. It's subtle, and though it rather hints that there will be either time travel or a ghost, there really isn't any of either, except sort of in Maria's imagination.

There's a lot going on that a more serious reader/critic/English major would appreciate; I'm sure I'm not getting it all. ?áFor example, one thing I did see (but never would have if I'd read this earlier) was the *L*iterary theme of contrast. ?áThere's the time of Harriet, the girl from a century ago who lives in the house Maria's family is renting, vs. Maria herself. ?áThere's Maria's family, with their only child and their quiet family, vs. the Fosters, with lots of kids and liveliness. ?áThere's the young Maria now, kind of moody and withdrawn, almost unpleasant, vs. the growing-up Maria, who benefits from her interactions with the Fosters to find a more wide-awake and confident version of herself. ?áThere's London vs. Lyme Regis.

And then there's the fossils, and Darwin, and evolution. ?áThe ammonites are stuck in time, as fossils... but their descendants have evolved and are still living today (we're led to assume; Lively's science is a little shaky in some points). ?áCats are descended from hunters, and people from a kind of ape. ?áWhat does this all mean? ?áLively's not telling... the thoughtful reader, the only kind of reader who will manage to get to the end of this, is left to puzzle and ponder.

I want to recommend this... but I don't know to whom. ?áPlease let me know if it appeals to you.?á
Oh, and it's beautifully written, full of poetic but not purple language... I will look for more by the author. ( )

Though I haven’t yet read it Penelope Lively’s 2013 memoir, >Ammonites and Leaping Fish: a Life in Time, picks up some up the themes that permeate her 1976 Whitbread Children’s Book Award winner: growing old, books, her cat, ammonites of course, all what has been described as “her identifying cargo of possessions”. Ostensibly a ghost story this is more about what it’s like to be a solitary bookish child on the cusp of maturity, all told with sensitivity and poetry, so much so that it’s hard not to read aspects of her own childhood into this book. Her parents took what has been called “a rather inactive role” in the author’s life during her upbringing in pre-war Egypt; she describes it as “a childhood with enormous opportunities for solitude and imagination,” during which she spent “long hours just playing alone, building elaborate stories in my mind around my toy animals.”

In A Stitch in Time Maria Foster is an only child taken in the summer of 1975 for a four week holiday to Lyme Regis; Mr and Mrs Foster have rented from a local resident, Mrs Shand, an old Victorian house which they discover is filled with furniture and artefacts accumulated over a hundred years. Maria is prone, much as the young Penelope Low did in Egypt, to having conversations with objects and animals in lieu of friends and siblings, which her rather distant parents construe as mumblings. But Maria is also an unusual auditory sensitive who hears sounds no one else hears; these noises include the squeak of a swing in the garden, the playing of the piano and the barking of a dog. She finds she develops an interest in fossils, a fascination she shares with Martin Lucas, whose noisy extended family are staying in the hotel next door; together they search Lyme’s beach for ammonites, the sea urchin Stomechinus bigranularis and Mesozoic oyster Gryphaea. But all the while Maria is becoming obsessed with one time inhabitants of their holiday home, Victorian sisters Susan and Harriet. In particular, what happened to Harriet? Is the answer in the landscape around Lyme — the fossils, the geology, the underlying morphology of the cliffs? And why can only she hear echoes of the past in her ammonite-shaped cochleae?

A Stitch in Time is a beautifully written novel. Every few pages includes poetic passages evoking a feeling, a scene, a landscape: for example, a lovely day was better than one with a boring blue sky “because the sky was pleasantly busy with clouds, huge shining heaps of cloud that roamed across the horizon, ebbed and flowed, formed and reformed as you watched them… Everything would go grey and muted, as the sun went in, and there would be this band of golden colour sweeping along the cliffs to Weymouth, lighting up now a bright slice of rock, now a green field, now the white sparkle of a house, now the turquoise of the sea itself.”

But it’s not just descriptions that ensured the accolade of a Whitbread Award; Maria herself is a believable character, a sensitive child who tries to piece together scraps of disparate evidence without asking questions that might make her seem stupid, the way that real children do. She’s also a very likeable individual, kind and thoughtful even if a bit of an enigma to the adults around her.

How does Lively weave a story around Maria? Like any good author she includes a number of vibrantly coloured strands. Principally there is the recurrent image of the ammonite, a fossil plentiful in the rocks around Lyme; here is a natural spiral which could have suggested a tale of parallel lives separated by a hundred and ten years — though of course the match can never be exact. There are also the parallel lives of author and fictional character, though unlike Maria in the story the young Penelope was not to make real friends at boarding school in England, having to wait until she went to Oxford.

And, speaking of strands, the ‘stitch in time’ of the title refers to a sampler that Maria comes across, a sampler that Maria’s Victorian counterpart Harriet had worked on and that her sister Susan completed. Other elements show up, scraps of odd material that somehow get drawn into the story. The dog that barks in Maria’s hearing which no one else is aware of? Perhaps Lively picked up on the legend of the Black Dog of Lyme: and though her black dog only shares a colour, not a backstory, with the local tale, it does function as an omen — just what it presages is not clear till the very end. And being set in Lyme Regis, one cannot not think of The French Lieutenant’s Women (1969) with its three optional endings; perhaps Lively is subtly referencing Fowles’ earlier novel by suggesting one ending while delivering a different conclusion.

This is the first novel by the author that I’ve read since the seventies, from her other children’s books The Whispering Knights (1971) and The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy (1971) to her Treasures of Time (1979) written for an adult audience, and it’s made me keen to read more of her work. I also wanted to compare it with two other similarly-titled time-related novels, the semi-autobiographical A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley and the science fantasy A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. The fact is, while it includes some autobiography, some science and of course some fantasy, it mixes these elements in very different and individual ways. And it was such a delight to read — certainly one to read again. ( )