At The Pitt-Rivers (x2)

The short story, 'At The Pitt-Rivers', by Penelope Lively, takes place at a museum called Pitt Rivers.

 

The main character of the story is a boy that often visits the Pitt-Rivers because he likes to work on his poetry. One day, while walking up the steps to the museum, he notices a woman sitting on the bench. This woman is not particularly pretty, according to him.

"This girl was definitely not attractive. In the first place she was in fact quite old, not far off thirty, I should think, and in the second she hadn't got a nice figure; her legs were kind of dumpy and she didn't have pretty hair or anything like that."(pg. 24-25)

When he walks nearer to the woman, he realizes that, even though her figure wasn't gorgeous, he face expression was "the most beautiful expression I've ever seen in my life."(pg. 25)He eventually leaves after staying a while to see who she was meeting. Later, he finds the woman again and realizes the "bloke" she was with appeared to be a man who looked over 50  years. He found this rather disgusting because of the wide age difference and how dumpy the old man looked.

"He might have been a schoolmastser or something, he wore those kind of clothes, old trousers and sweater, and he had greyish hair,a bit long.(pg.27)

He was thoroughly disgusted with this and left with a huff. Later in the story, though, his feelings about the couple change rapidly when he sees them again at the museum. He sees that the old man  is the person who gives the girl her delectable expression. He also starts to see that two people don't have to be attractive to be together. As the story goes on, he finds the girl again, only to find out how unhappy she was. When they exited the museum, the old man leaves and the lady sits on the bench, looking miserable and "out-of-it".

"I could see her face then, and I hope I don't ever see anyone look so unhappy again. I truly hope that."(pg. 31)

Because of this, he tears up  his poem, even though he has been working on it forever.

I think he tore up his poem because he may have realized that not every true love has a happy ending. The story states that he has been in love twice. The first time was with a girl in a class at his school, but it only turned out it was a bit of a trial run and he faded away.

"The second time was last year, when I was fifteen. She came to stay with her married sister who lives round the corner from us and though it's months and months ago now I still feel quite faint and weak when I go past the house."(pg.25)

When he took the second girl out, he realized they had nothing to talk about and decided that he preferred just thinking about her. Both the times he has fallen in love, they turned out to be all right or better, so he assumes when you fall in love, there's always a solution and you're never really unhappy. When he sees the girl and the old man part, he could apprehend the true meaning of true love and that it doesn't always work out. After that, he rips up his poem about an old man and a boy trading ideas and find out in the end that they're the same person in order to write about this experience instead of his first idea, since the couple is all he probably can think about now.