‘In old age you can close your eyes and summon your youth at will. As a writer it puts one at a distinct advantage’

‘The idea that memory is linear,” says Penelope Lively, crisply, “is nonsense. What we have in our heads is a collection of frames. As to time itself – can it be linear when all these snatches of other presents exist at once in your mind? A very elusive and tricky concept, time.”

It’s the concept that has provided the backcloth to which Lively has stitched the plots of her novels for the past 40 years, and which has driven her to scale the heights of both children’s and adults’ fiction (she remains the only author to have won both the Carnegie medal and the Booker prize). It’s the disjunction between time and memory that intrigues her; the irreconcilability of the calendar’s steady forward march with the extempore jumble of shards and fragments that we carry around in our memories, encapsulated in the heroine of her 1987 novel Moon Tiger, who declares from her deathbed: “There is no chronology inside my head.” Now 76, Lively finds that her own experience of ageing has deepened rather than resolved the paradox. “In old age, you realise that while you’re divided from your youth by decades, you can close your eyes and summon it at will,” she says. “As a writer it puts one at a distinct advantage. When writing Moon Tiger from the point of view of an old woman, I kept worrying: would she really think like this? Now I’ve experienced every age, and can fish back.”

It’s an advantage she exploits to the full in her 16th novel for adults, Family Album. Published next month, it is a sophisticated investigation into the effects of time’s passage and the reliability of memory presented in the guise of a minor-key domestic drama. Half a century of sprawling family life is dished out via the kaleidoscopic, atemporal accounts of the nine inhabitants of a gently disintegrating Victorian villa. The central mystery, which is scarcely a mystery at all, is revealed piecemeal, with no recognised moment of denouement: the novel’s real revelation is that our individual histories bear only a passing relationship to those of the people who have lived alongside us.

When considering Lively’s own life, however, it’s a struggle to tease it apart from her generation’s collective narrative. “I see myself,” she concedes, “as someone manipulated by history.” She was born Penelope Low in 1933 in Cairo, where her father was employed by the National Bank of Egypt. Her earliest memories are a snapshot of interwar expatriate family life, from the well-staffed house on the city’s outskirts to the nanny-turned-governess and the elegant, distant parents. An only child, she spent hours playing by herself, existing in what she describes in her memoir Oleander, Jacaranda as “a condition of frenzied internal narrative”. The outbreak of the second world war kept the family in Cairo until 1942, when she, her mother and her governess fled to Palestine to wait out the fighting. After peace was declared in 1945, Lively discovered abruptly that the global turmoil had its articulation in her own life: her parents’ marriage disintegrated, and she was dispatched to boarding school in Sussex.

About school, she is emphatic. “It was ghastly. I’d never been to any kind of school, and I was hopeless at it. Schoolgirls can be very malevolent: nowadays it would probably be defined as bullying, but then the concept didn’t exist – and this wasn’t somewhere it would have been bothered about, anyway.” The trouble wasn’t confined to her fellow pupils: Lively remembers the school itself as “extraordinarily unimaginative. One punishment was to read for an hour in the library, which pretty much summed up the attitude towards literature. I was reprimanded by the headmistress for having a copy of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse in my locker.” Holidays – spent in the family house in Somerset with her grandmother and her aunt, the artist Rachel Reckitt (whose woodcuts now hang on Lively’s walls) – provided a respite. The household’s familiar objects (an intricately worked sampler, the napkin rings in the silver cupboard) would eventually resurface as touchstones in her 1995 memoir-cum-social history, A House Unlocked, in which her love for the place and its occupants is palpable.

Still, Lively excelled in the school certificate at 16, prompting her father to pay a visit to her headmistress. “He said to her: ‘I understand that quite a few girls go to university nowadays. I was wondering if Penelope should think of it.’ She looked at him in horror and replied ‘Oh no, no – our girls don’t do that.’ The implication was that you got your school certificate and married – or at worst tried a domestic science course.” Luckily, her father took a more enlightened view. Lively was moved to a crammer, and applied to Oxford to read modern history. “I wasn’t an assiduous student, and I didn’t get a good degree, but it certainly formed my mindset,” she says. “I’d gone to Oxford with the idea that there was an account of the past, and the study of history involved learning it. But in my very first tutorial I was set an essay entitled ‘Who were the Jutes?’ I went to the Bodleian, read everything I could find on them, and realised there was no simple answer: people were still arguing about it. The experience of learning about history and the ways in which it’s discussed kindled my interest in memory. It didn’t make me a novelist, but it very much conditioned the kind of novels I’ve written.”

It was at Oxford, too, that Lively met her husband. Their meeting marked another moment in which her life-story bumped up against that of the century. Jack was a working-class boy from Newcastle, Penelope “a girl from the southern gentry”: it was only thanks to the war (which saw Jack evacuated to the house of a retired schoolteacher who recognised and cultivated his intelligence) and the social upheaval that followed that their paths crossed at all. Newly graduated, Lively was working as a research assistant when Jack arrived. “I’d heard some of the other fellows talking about this very clever chap coming over from Cambridge called Jack Lively. I remember thinking the name sounded like a character in an 18th-century play,” she smiles. Their friendship, fostered “over coffee in smoke-filled rooms”, quickly blossomed, and in less than a year the pair were married. It was a relationship that sustained them both until Jack’s death from cancer in 1998, 41 years later, although Lively is at pains not to romanticise it retrospectively, pointing out that “like any marriage, it had its periods of white water”. “In many ways Jack was very different from me: much cleverer, very combative. His chief intellectual pleasure was a good argument, and he had a shorter fuse than I have.” But he was, she says, always quick to apologise – and when it came to her writing, he acted as both ally and advocate. “He thoroughly enjoyed the fact that I wrote, and was always my first reader. I never asked him directly ‘what do you think?’, because of course what you want to hear is that the whole thing’s superb, and he would never have said that. But he commented on the specifics. I don’t have that any longer, and I miss it hugely.”

The couple married in 1957 and moved to Swansea, where Jack took up an academic post. Their daughter, Josephine, was born within a year of their wedding; their son, Adam, three years after that. At a stroke, Lively found herself removed from the intellectual atmosphere of Oxford and launched on to motherhood’s merry-go-round. “It was difficult,” she admits. “I was just 24 when Josephine was born – doing all the nappy stuff in extreme youth, really – and there were the usual constraints of not being able to afford a babysitter and so forth. Academics were just as poorly paid then as now, and we didn’t have a penny to spare. I survived by making friends with other young mothers who were interested in the same sort of things; we used to get together with our children on the beach and talk. That was a life raft. And I read passionately: if I was feeding the baby I always had a book in one hand. Though when they reached three or four, I was able to read with them, which was a joy.”

It was this immersion in children’s literature that first prompted Lively to put pen to paper, although she held off from doing so until her mid-30s, when her son was in school. “Reading with the children made me think: I wonder if I could do this?” she recalls. Her first novel for children, Astercote, was published in 1970; she followed it with two or three others which she dismisses now as “crap, quite honestly”. It wasn’t until the publication of The Ghost of Thomas Kempe in 1973 that she found her register. “I tried to write out of my own adult preoccupations with the operation of memory and the nature of evidence,” she says, “but in a way that meant children would come away from it thinking ‘I’ve read a ghost story,’ rather than ‘my gosh, I’ve just read a book about the operation of memory.’” She succeeded: the tale of 12-year-old James’s struggle with the shade of an ornery 17th-century alchemist won the Carnegie medal, became a staple of school reading lists and led the critic David Rees to praise it as “unique … neither history nor fantasy, but something of both.”

Although The Road to Lichfield, Lively’s first adult novel, wasn’t published until 1977, she had begun writing for an older audience long before. “At the same time as the children’s books, I was writing short stories for adults and putting them away in a drawer,” she says. “I wasn’t convinced I had anything to say to people of my own age.” In the end, however, the move into adult fiction – a discipline Lively views as “not different, but done differently; I’ve always seen the shift between the two as a gear change” – became “necessary. I remember thinking after several children’s books, there were things I couldn’t do there; ways in which I wanted to write, things I wanted to say. A lot of fiction is to do with the discussion of emotional responses, and there are limits to the emotional responses a child can have – they’ve experienced love, for example, but not sexual love. There’s a whole landscape you can’t explore.”

After The Road to Lichfield, Lively’s publishers persuaded her to turn out her drawer, and a prize-winning collection of short stories, Nothing Missing but the Samovar, followed. In 1979, Kingsley Amis awarded her the Arts Council National Book Award for Treasures of Time, the story of an archaeologist which draws explicitly on what Lively’s former editor, the poet Anthony Thwaite, calls “her authority and fluency on the subject of the persistence of the past”. She notched up her second Booker-shortlisting in 1984 for According to Mark, and when Moon Tiger was published in 1987, Lively found herself on the shortlist once again, this time facing a line-up that included Iris Murdoch, Peter Ackroyd and Chinua Achebe. “I wasn’t a favourite,” she recalls candidly. “I wasn’t expected to win, so I wasn’t expecting to win. But Jack said to me that lunchtime ‘You just might, so you’d better have something to say’. I gave it about three minutes’ thought, and then had to stand up and speak on national television.”

Moon Tiger is the story of Claudia Hampton, a brittle, self-reliant historian who excavates her own memories as she lies dying and finds her affair with a British army officer during her time as a war reporter in Egypt at her life’s core. Lively draws on her own childhood to furnish the novel, but there the similarities between her and Claudia end. “I never felt very close to her, although I admire her,” she says. “I like women like that, upfront and aggressive. Male readers’ reactions were very interesting: I used to get letters from men saying either ‘that’s just the sort of woman I’ve been looking for all my life’ or ‘I couldn’t stand her’ – which always seemed to say more about the men who were writing.”

Ah, those male readers. Throughout her career in adult fiction, the perception that Lively is a “women’s writer” – with all the vaguely negative connotations of that label – has persisted. Reduce her novels to plot-points and it’s possible to see why: she is fascinated by families, gives precedence to relationships and is comfortable writing within the domestic sphere. But Lively rejects the classification. “I don’t think it’s true,” she says. “My last novel [Consequences] was romantic, but everyone’s entitled to one of those, surely? And Family Album is indeed a family book; but after all, men live family lives too. I find the notion that a book could be ‘for’ women or men puzzling.” Thwaite puts it more succinctly: “The idea of her being a woman’s writer comes from people who haven’t read her.”

Over the past decade, in fact, Lively has been edging away from fiction into memoir: in Oleander, Jacaranda (subtitled “A Childhood Perceived”), she considers the relationship between childhood memory and adult hindsight; in A House Unlocked, she examines the connections between her family’s history and that of the wider world. And in Making It Up, her latest and most ambitious effort, she approaches her personal history rather as one of the archaeologists who populate her work might approach unearthed artefacts: turning her life’s chief junctures over in her hands, and exploring the possibilities they represent. “I don’t know quite what prompted it, except that it’s an old-age book,” she says. “You have to have reached a point where you can look back over your life and see the moments when you went in one direction or another.”

Despite having health scares over the past few years, Lively continues to write. “It’s always just gone on,” she says. “I remember reading an interview with Iris Murdoch in which she was asked how soon after finishing one book she started the next: she said ‘half an hour’. I’m not quite like her – there’s usually a gap, and there was a long one after Family Album: I didn’t start a new book for nine or 10 months, and thought maybe that was the last one. But then an idea came into my head. So off I go again.”

Lively on Lively

“Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water. The pack of cards I carry around is forever shuffled and re-shuffled; there is no sequence, everything happens at once. The machines of the new technology, I understand, perform in much the same way: all knowledge is stored, to be summoned up at the flick of a key. They sound, in theory, more efficient. Some of my keys don’t work; others demand pass-words, codes, random unlocking sequences. The collective past, curiously, provides these. It is public property, but it is also deeply private. We all look differently at it. My Victorians are not your Victorians. My seventeenth century is not yours … The signals of my own past come from the received past. The lives of others slot into my own life. I, me. Claudia H.”

Reading this passage, I feel as though someone else wrote it. Someone else did, of course; I am not the same person I was then – I have read more, thought more, forgotten plenty. It is in the voice of Claudia Hampton, the narrator of the novel – a historian and journalist – and, while she is not me, I did give her some of my thoughts about the operation of memory and the nature of evidence. I never entirely liked Claudia, but I had great respect for her, and envied her ability to crash through life in a way that I cannot. And note that – in 1987 – she is not yet computerised but sees a nice analogy between “the new technology” and her own thought processes.