A Stitch in Time. Penelope Lively

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       To Joy, Max, Tim and Nick

       Why You’ll Love This Book by Michelle Magorian

      Imagine a time when you could while away a holiday listening to the sea. Unimpeded by noises from the modern world, you could gaze, and daydream, and maybe imagine another person looking at the same seascape and cliffs in a previous century, surrounded by the same billion-year-old fossils in the rocks.

      In A Stitch in Time by Penelope Lively, eleven-year-old Maria, plain and small, is a thoughtful girl with a sense of humour that few people are aware of. Her parents, a quiet, self-contained couple, live a life of order and routine and treat Maria like pleasant wallpaper.

      It is summer in the nineteen seventies. For the whole of August and the first week of September, her parents have rented an old house whose back garden, bordered by dense shrubbery, drops down to a hedge, beyond which the sea meets the sky. The brown interior of the house with its brown velvet curtains still contains its original Victorian furniture. Inside its walls all Maria can hear is the humming of the fridge, the clock ticking and the rustle of her father’s newspaper. Outside, there are other sounds, a squeaky swing and a dog barking but when she looks they are nowhere to be found.

      Maria, out of habit, returns to her interior world of make believe conversations with objects and animals, including the large tree at the bottom of the garden and the house’s smug resident cat.

      It is up in her small bedroom that she discovers a tiny chest of drawers containing a collection of hand written labelled objects, objects as blue grey as the surrounding cliffs where they had been discovered. Fossils.

      On a visit to the elderly neighbour who owns their rented house, tongue-tied Maria notices a framed Victorian sampler in her flat and is told that it was made by a little girl called Harriet. Maria recognises the house stitched onto it as the one where she and her parents are staying. She spots the tree at the foot of the garden, now big enough for Maria to hide in its branches and spy on the noisy family staying at a hotel next door. Among the stitched flowers there is a black iron swing and a dog cavorting about and at the bottom, a line of fossils …

      Noticing the absence of Harriet in later family photographs in the flat, Maria begins to wonder if something terrible had happened to her.

      On another visit a girl looks back at her from the framed sampler and then disappears. Is Harriet attempting to reach her? Is she trying to warn her of some impending danger? Or is Maria becoming her?

      Through Maria’s growing fascination with fossils she makes friends with Martin, one of the children from the loud and squabbling family, and awkwardly begins to open up and have conversations with him instead of petrol pumps.

      A Stitch in Time is a story of light and shade, of collecting fossils and playing hide and seek, picnics on the beach amid notices warning of the dangers of landslides on the cliffs, sunny days with watercolour views of blues and greens interspersed with grey skies, dark shadows, rainy afternoons and chilly seas. It’s a time for finding out what is true and what is imaginary and of discovering that people from the past are not mere faces in a sepia photograph but flesh and blood.

      It’s a story where a solitary girl who lives in an imaginary world is shaken out of her silence by a Victorian sampler and a friendly but disorganised family who draw her into their chaos, gently transforming her into a talkative and laughing girl with a new voice. A more direct voice. A voice to be listened to by real people not imaginary ones, and that includes her surprised parents. Gentle and humorous with a touch of mystery.

       Michelle Magorian

      Trained at Rose Bruford College and L’Ecole Internationale de Mime, has a postgraduate Certificate in Film Studies (BFI/ London University) and an Honorary Doctorate (Portsmouth University).

      Has performed in plays, musicals and one-woman shows and written lyrics for Gary Carpenter, Stephen Keeling, Bob Buckley and Alexander L’Estrange.

      Has just completed her seventh novel and is currently researching a new novel. ITV Productions bought the rights of Just Henry – Costa Award winner.

      Her first book Goodnight Mister Tom has celebrated its 30th anniversary and has been brought out in a special edition alongside Back Home.

      A stage version of Goodnight Mister Tom, which opened at Chichester, completed a tour of fourteen theatres and received wonderful reviews. More recently, the tour has played in the West End, winning an Olivier award.