Tag: Penelope Mortimer

‘The Skylight’ by Penelope Mortimer

Set in rural France during the 1950s, this story uses the classic device of terrorising the reader over the fate of a five-year-old child, who is encouraged to enter a locked holiday house via the titular skylight and open the window downstairs. The mother, frazzled from travelling on her own with her son, is nicely drawn. Students I have shared this with have been split over whether she is a victim of circumstance and the age she lives in, or a neurotic idiot who shouldn’t be in charge of a child. I tend towards the former, as a parent of young children who knows it’s not plain sailing. A brilliant piece of ordinary horror and the ending is one of surprise that leaves me reeling after many, many reads.

Collected in Saturday Lunch with The Brownings, 1977) Chosen by Andrew McDonnell

‘The Skylight’ by Penelope Mortimer

“The heat, as the taxi spiralled the narrow hill bends, became more evident.” Apart from anything else, I like my copy of this story collection by Penelope Mortimer, from 1966 (the collection first being published six years earlier). It features, on the front cover, a fine monochrome portrait of the author laconically burning her way through a cigarette, leaning back and observing all human folly in her wicker chair, The story itself, by the way, tells of a mother arriving at a holiday destination with her five-year-old son, and the anxieties that accrue, accumulate, accrete grotesquely, around the idea. The tension it generates is, to my mind, extraordinary. But don’t think about that now. Just relax. Pour a drink. Read on.

From Saturday Lunch with the Brownings, Arrow, 1966