49 A Traveller In Time, Alison Uttley
In the faint light of the landing, I thought I saw the doors drift out of obsurity. Dare I open one of them? I asked myself. Dare I? From down the narrow stair came Ian's laugh and then the deep voice of Uncle Barnabas. The safe world was there, and I had only to turn away, but I longed to enter that hidden timeless world where the hours and seconds were crystallised into one transparent drop, round and clear.
Thank you to @DuPainDuVinDuFromage (and your DD) for the inspiration to re-read this lovely book, which was a favourite of mine as a girl. Written in 1939, it tells the story of Penelope, who is sent with her siblings to a family farm in rural Derbyshire to recover from a bout of illness. While staying with her aunt and uncle in their old farmhouse, filled with rooms and mysterious objects from the past, she finds herself slipping back into an earlier time, when the house was home to the Catholic Babington family and her ancestors were living and working there. She becomes increasingly involved with the household, and caught up in the plot to rescue Mary, Queen of Scots, from house arrest in a nearby manor house.
Both the "present" (1930s) and past sections are beautifully and vividly described. Penelope spends a lot of time in both - it's not like some timeslip novels where the present bit is boring filler. Uttley wrote The Country Child, and her love of rural life and its traditions is woven through this book too. The unique atmosphere of ATIT comes from the way Penelope can half-see the ghosts of the past while she is in the present, while in the past she half-remembers the present, including the eventual fates of Mary and Babington. Time truly slips; she moves back and forth between the two, feeling at times as though she is dreaming, in both worlds at once, and yet not quite in either.
Timeslip books are full of melancholy. There's a realisation from the protagonist that the people that they are meeting in the past, so real and full of life, are mostly likely long dead (certainly in this case, as there are many years between the 1580s and the 1930s). I think it plays on our longing to return to past times, to see people who are lost to us.
Daisy May Johnson (a children's author and academic), writes this in her blog post about this book:
It is full of a desperate ache for the inevitability of things; the world turns, people live, people die, and to be a brief part of that world is a painful, brutal gift. It is a gift that nobody would ever return; the preciousness of it. The perfection of it. But it is not easy and it is all the better for it. I have increasingly come to think that those authors who can do this understand the brutality of childhood. The raw truth of it. The way perfection and heartbreak can dance together, so close, so tightly wound. The way a day can be beautiful and then desperate, all at once.
Ugh. So true. The worst part of all of these books is the moment when the protagonist realises that the past world is slipping away from them, that for whatever reason they will no longer be able to travel back there. Heart-breaking, always.
Huge bold from me but sad.