Houses, homes, and light in the dark

Layers of the past: Avebury Manor as glimpsed from the garden.

After writing six novels in which one of the central characters is a house, there seems little point in trying to deny my obsession. I adore houses: I love them architecturally and aesthetically – floor plans, proportions, rooflines and materials – but I also value and respect them as places where human beings lead their lives. And it is their connection with people – their status as homes – that interests me most as a storyteller.

Through the Looking Glass: stepping into the past at Kelmscott Manor via Rossetti’s mirror

When writing The Clockmaker’s Daughter, I was able to give full vent to my love of old houses and the particular stretch of countryside along the upper reaches of the Thames. I visited the Vale of White Horse, the villages of Lechlade and Buscot, and came to know the shallow tributary that runs through Southrop and Eastleach very well. I explored a number of real houses, for instance the early sixteenth-century Avebury Manor (which gives an incredible sense of the layers of time, sitting, as it does, within a group of Neolithic stone circles) and Kelmscott Manor, the one-time country home of William Morris (and his wife, Jane, and friend, Dante Gabriel Rossetti). Both houses are now open as museums and Kelmscott is still furnished with Morris’s possessions.

I love the countryside of the Upper Thames – the landscape, both natural and manmade, is incredibly beautiful – and for a book like The Clockmaker’s Daughter, in which I sought to depict a house with which a person might become obsessed, and that would later provide a place of refuge for various residents over time, it was a perfect fit. I’m sure my love for the English countryside was inspired, in part, by the reading that I did as a child. So many of my first favourite books seem to have been set in houses on the edge of deep, dark woods, or on the banks of sunlit rivers, and I’m convinced that the books that we devour as children form a landscape of the imagination every bit as vivid and real as the geographical landscape outside the window.

A beautiful stretch of the Upper Thames, near Lechlade

I have a great sympathy for people who fall in love with houses. I fall in love with houses all the time. And Edward Radcliffe, my artist in The Clockmaker’s Daughter, falls deeply in love with Birchwood Manor. Edward’s affection is more than an aesthetic appreciation for the house, however. It is sparked initially by an encounter in his childhood that blends with the elements of a local folktale – the tale of the Eldritch Children – to convince him that the land on which the house stands is ‘lit’ in some way, and that the house itself is thus a place of safety and protection – a light in the dark.

And he is right, for Birchwood Manor is not like other houses. Juliet, too, over seventy years later, recognises the strange power of Birchwood Manor. One hot, sunny afternoon in 1928, she falls asleep beneath a Japanese Maple tree in the front garden, and is struck when she awakens by the beauty of the place: more than that, by the way it makes her feel. “Love – that’s what she felt, an odd, strong, general love that seemed to flow from everything she saw and heard: the sunlit leaves, the dark hollows beneath the trees, the stones of the house, the birds that called as they flew overhead. And in its glow, she glimpsed momentarily what religious people must surely feel at church: the sense of being bathed in the light of certainty that comes from being known from the inside out, from belonging somewhere and to someone. It was simple. It was luminous, and beautiful, and true.”

Human beings crave security and there are few words as loaded with meaning as that of ‘home’. As Juliet reflects, it is a word of multiple meanings: it is “the perfunctory description accorded the building in which one currently resides, but also the warm, rounded name used to describe the place from which ultimate comfort and safety is derived.” And of course, ‘home’ doesn’t need to be a place of bricks and mortar. It can be another person and even a state of mind: “Home was Alan’s voice at the end of a long, hard day; his arms around her; the known quantity of his love for her and hers for him”.

A ‘home’ can also be built from words and imagination. One of the most wonderful and wondrous properties of a book is its ability to transport us, as if by magic, into another world, every bit as vivid as our own: a place where we can live for a time, and to which we can belong. The world of The Clockmaker’s Daughter is that of Birchwood Manor and the special residents over time to whom the house decides to reveal her secrets. I love the way old houses accumulate the experiences of generations, becoming repositories of memories, and in The Clockmaker’s Daughter we meet a number of the characters who have called Birchwood Manor home over the century. Connected by the house, their lives intersect across time, and only together do the stories of Edward, Lucy, Ada, Leonard, Juliet, Tip, Elodie, Jack – and of course Birdie Bell – reveal the answer to the mystery at the novel’s heart.

Kate Morton, London, 2018

The Thames in London. I love the contrast between the wide muddy urban river and the pristine narrow waterway near Lechlade

Read a ‘secret’ story from Birchwood Manor

Did you know?

The Clockmaker’s Daughter was written under the working title THE ILLUMINATION OF BIRDIE BELL.

WALKING THE CLOCKMAKER’S DAUGHTER

Kate tells how her love of walking found its way into one of the characters in The Clockmaker’s Daughter.

THE RIVER LEACH. Kate takes us to one of her favourite places and one of the key inspirations for the location of Birchwood Manor

THE UPPER THAMES: autumn on the river

KELMSCOTT MANOR. William Morris’s one-time country home, and one of Kate’s favourites

FOOTPATHS. Kate talks about the simple pleasures of walking the English countryside on the public footpaths.

EASTLEACH. The Church of St Michael and St Martin

EASTLEACH. Discover the houses that helped to inspire Lucy Radcliffe’s home

THE STRAND. Site of Elodie’s workplace