Travelling Through Time
I have my sons to thank for one of my wonderful literary adventures this summer. We were out on Long Island, spending the day canvassing the streets of Sag Harbor. My oldest son had noticed a used bookstore on our way into town and insisted that we backtrack to find it. He headed off with one of his brothers on foot and I followed behind. A few blocks away from the main streets of town, just when I was sure we had taken a wrong turn, there it was: Canio’s Books. And waiting on a rickety old table out on the sidewalk was a book I had been looking for: A Traveller in Time, the original paperback edition of the 1939 classic by Alison Uttley!
A Traveller in Time tells the story of a young English girl of the early twentieth century sent out to the country from London to recover her health. She settles in with an old aunt and uncle, caretakers of an ancient farm and suddenly little Penelope is able to travel back in time, all the way to the sixteenth century. There she finds herself involved in the famous (and historical) Babington plot, an ill-conceived plan to rescue Mary, Queen of Scotts. Anthony Babington was hanged, drawn, and quartered for his efforts, and Penelope knows what awaits her new friend and his family, but there is nothing she can do to prevent their downfall.
We know where the plot is going (it is history, after all) but the magic is in the details of this book. A Traveller in Time is chock full of glorious and mundane (but still lovely) details of sixteenth century manor life, everything from long descriptions of the herb gardens to mouth-watering accounts of the meals, and from needlepoint to falconry. And as an added incentive for us twenty-first century readers, the details of Penelope’s days when she is not traveling back to the sixteenth century but is toddling around the London of her times, or wandering happily around the backward country farm she loves, provide another stop for us on the time machine, and another delightful window into the past.
The store where I bought my beloved little Uttley paperback is also a journey back in time, not only for the antique nature of its housing but for what is contained within its somewhat creaky walls: books, old and new, and all of them offering adventure, whether it be novels crossing back in time, across oceans, and into new universes; or poems of known and unknown bards; or essays on travel; or short stories, collections of Hemingway or Alice Munro or David Barthelme.
A book is always a time travel experience, taking me out of one moment and into another, and out of one place and onto another, wholly different, piece of the rock. Easy to come back — simply close the book — and just as easy to take off again. So many books waiting to be opened, so many places to go. Time traveller, reader, and adventurer. That’s me.
