Penelope Lively on Howling Landscapes

British novelist and children's writer Penelope Lively's latest book, Making it Up, is a series of short stories describing what her life might have been like had she taken another path. One of those roads not taken was as an archaeologist. In the chapter called "The Temple of Mithras", Lively's alter-ego Alice meditates on the noisy past.

Alice... is thinking about this deceptive place, this tranquil vista. You are looking at mayhem, all over Wiltshire and Dorset and Somerset, those calm green counties with their sleepy villages and the cricket pitches and the primary school playgrounds and the pubs with the hanging baskets that drip petunias and lobelia. Surface veneer, all of it. Dig a few feet and you are into bloodshed. The arrowheads and the axes and the swords and the daggers. The Stonehenge skeleton with the flint barb in its ribs and the bones at Maiden Castle, chopped about by sword blows, and the split skulls here at Cornbury Hill. This landscape is howling, if you listen.

Penelope Lively. 2005. Making it Up. Viking Press, NYC.

Permission to quote from Making it Up granted by Alice Wilson of David Higham Co. (Lively/29.03.06).