Publisher's Synopsis
"The house as I knew it exists now only in my mind. The furnishings are precise and clear, the sounds and smells are as they ever were" Penelope Lively recalls Golsoncott, the country house in Somerset bought by her grandparents in 1923, when it required the services of eleven people; by the 1990s this was remembered only in the wages book buried in the hall chest and the bell system in the pantry. As she remembers the sometimes strange articles there - the gong- stand, the potted-meat jars, the bon-bon dishes - Lively charts the social changes and shifting attitudes of the last century, for Golsoncott was touched by the cataclysmic events of the 20th century: the Russian Revolution, the Holocaust and the Blitz. All made their mark on the house, if you know where to look.
