Pitt RIver 2nd edition

Pitt Rivers 2nd edition

The short story At the Pitt Rivers by Penelope Lively was about a fifteen year old boy. He goes to a museum very often, called The Pitt Rivers. He thinks that he know a lot about love. One day he notices a woman sitting on a bench in the museum watching the entrance. “She wasn’t specially ugly; just very ordinary—you wouldn’t look at her twice. She was sitting on a bench, watching the entrance.” Later this woman meets up with and old man and the boy would see them almost every time he would go to the museum. The boy started to get interested in the couple and starts to watch them every time he sees them. At first he thinks that it is disgusting that an old man and a thirty year old woman could fall in love. Later he completely changes his attitude. In the end of the book the woman and man part and he rips up his poem that he had been working on for about a month. He probably ripped up the poem because he figured out that there is way more to love than he really thought. That an old man can fall in love with a middle aged woman. He thought that all goes well in love but in the end the old man leaves her.  He says “I hope I don’t see anybody that unhappy again.”

                He probably tore up the poem because there was much more to love than he had thought. That an unattractive woman and a good looking man could fall in love. He thinks that “I mean in films you can always tell who’s going to fall for who because they’ll be two good-lookers.” This is what he thought of love, that only two good lookers could fall in love or that people have to be about the same age. This couple showed him that anyone could fall in love no matter what they look like or what their age is. The woman was a plain woman that “you wouldn’t look at twice” and the man was just an average man too. he thought that he a lot at the young age of fifteen “I suppose that you could say I’d learned something else in the Pitt Rivers, by accident.”  He also thought that in love everything is right and nothing can go wrong. But this showed him that it can, “I saw them go past—just their heads, above the glass cases—and something wasn’t—right… she was miserable.” Maybe the poem he wrote was about an old man and boy talking about love that he thought and that he realized that it wasn’t right he just ripped it up and threw it away. “I never did go on with that poem. I tore it up, as far as it had got; I wasn’t so sure about that conversation, that there could ever be one, or not like I’d been imagining, anyway.” He had thought that he had known everything about love but in the end he realized that he had known basically nothing.