Book - The Distant Hours

The Distant Hours

by Kate Morton

"A long lost letter arrives in the post and Edie Burchill finds herself on a journey to Milderhurst Castle, a great but moldering old house, where the Blythe spinsters live and where her mother was billeted 50 years before as a 13 year old child during WWII. The elder Blythe sisters are twins and have spent most of their lives looking after the third and youngest sister, Juniper, who hasn’t been the same since her fiancé jilted her in 1941.

Inside the decaying castle, Edie begins to unravel her mother’s past. But there are other secrets hidden in the stones of Milderhurst, and Edie is about to learn more than she expected. The truth of what happened in ‘the distant hours’ of the past has been waiting a long time for someone to find it.

Morton once again enthralls readers with an atmospheric story featuring unforgettable characters beset by love and circumstance and haunted by memory, that reminds us of the rich power of storytelling." Image & summary from goodreads.com

“…Flying back and forth in time between the evacuation of children from London prior to the blitz of 1941 and the modern day (1992), Book editor Edie Burchill uncovers the truth behind the creation of "The True History of the Mud Man," a spectacularly successful children's story written by the patriarch of Milderhurst Castle in Kent, now in the possession of the "Sisters Blythe," three characters truly wrecked by their father and their connection to the baleful book he wrote. Central to the complex and thoroughly gripping plot is Edie's mother, who was thirteen when she was evacuated in the war to Milderhurst and became entwined in the drama. Her part of the tale is only one of the things Edie discovers. … posted by Roger Kean on goodreads.com

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Letters as time travelers

Edie is reading letters her mother wrote when she was a young teenager and living in Milderhurst Castle with the three sisters. “I’d reached the end of the first page but didn’t turn it over. I sat motionless, as if I were listening very carefully to something. and I was, I suppose; for the little girl’s voice had drifted from the shoebox and was echoing now in the shadow-hung hollows of the room. I’m in the country now...they call him Daddy...there is a tower, and three sisters...  Letters are special like that. Conversations waft away the moment they’ve been had, but the written word prevails. Those letters were little time travelers; fifty years they’d lain patiently in their box, waiting for me to find them.” (222-223)

Houses & memories & the future

Percy was approaching the castle - After stopping to listen to what the house had to tell her (words that had soaked into the earth around the castle and into the castle’s foundations) - 

“She could hear voices inside as she drew nearer: Saffy’s and Juniper’s, and another, a child’s voice, a girl. Allowing herself a moment’s hesitation, Percy climbed the first step, then the next, remembering the thousands of times she’d run through the door, in a hurry to get to the future, to whatever was coming next, to this moment.”  (261)

Trying to catch a dream

“I woke with a start, catching my dream in the process of dissolving. Tattered fancies hung like ghosts in the room’s corners and I lay very still for a time, willing them not to dissipate. It seemed to me that even the slightest movement, the merest hint of morning sunlight, would burn the imprints off like fog. and I didn’t want to lose them yet. The dream had been so vivid, the heaviness of longing so real that when I pressed my hand against my chest I half expected to find the skin bruised.” (Edie dreaming she was a small girl at Milderhurst Castle, dreaming of the Mud Man) (271)

Family history

If you don’t really know what happened do you tell your interpretation? What if you interpret it incorrectly? Edie heard two versions of how Tom Cavill died. Edie decided not to tell either story nor any of the story of the origin of the Mud Man book that made the sisters’ father well known and wealthy.

“I knew the answer to a riddle [origin/background of Mud Man story] that had plagued literary critics for seventy-five years, but I couldn’t share it with the world. To do so would have felt like a tremendous betrayal of Percy Blythe. ‘This is a family story,’ she’d said, before asking whether she could trust me. It would also have made me responsible for unveiling a sad and sordid story that would overshadow the novel forever. The book that had made me a reader. “…The truth had died with the three sisters, and if the foundation stones of the castle whispered still about what had happened that night in October 1941, I couldn’t hear them. I didn’t want to hear them. Not anymore. It was time for me to go back to my own life.” (514)

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Click here for a post about "The Forgotten Garden," my first Kate Morton book.