Lamorna

LAMORNA

Lamorna is the name of Barbara Berrill´s house, but, for Stephen, "Lamorna" means a lot of different things:

• the sweetness of Barbara and Keith's mother, (and therefore, his discovery of sexual attraction), 
• the match with which he and Barbara lit their first cigarrete (a rite of passage to adulthood)
•  the terror of the Lanes (and how he overcame it)  
• the silence under the elders (=the loneliness of Uncle Peter, and his terrible reality) 

Furthermore, the name seems to represent a concrete period and place in the narrator´s life. Stephen refers to the "Lamorna Time" and to " a distant land across the sea" The time  seems to be his transition between childhood and adulthood, and the place where that happened is the Close, in the suburbs of London.

The name is also linked to the smell of the privet in the lookout:"... And, woven somehow into the sweetness of the smell(...) L...A...M...O...R...N...A" We knew the smell was important for Stephen, as it aroused a lot of different feelings and in fact  is the catalyst of the whole story. Now we learn that the perfume of the privet and the name Lamorna are closely related, and they connote the same ideas for him. 

In conclusion, Lamorna is the  mixture of sensations, experiences, feelings  and discoveries that turned Stephen into an adult. It describes the time in which, while playing a spying game, he learnt about love, relationships and growing up, and in which he gradually abandonned the innocence of childhood.

The Landscape Beyond the Tunnel

What is there beyond the tunnel?

On the other side of the tunnel, there used to be a narrow path that was almost covered by the growth of vegetation on each side of it in the summer. Even though the path was just one, it was usually called “The Lanes”. A bit further on,  there were some tumbledown hovels that the children called “the Cottages”, ignoring the fact that it was an extremely grand name for such collapsed dwellings. All around the place, there were pieces of damaged objects,  children with ragged clothes and “misshapen dogs”. An abandoned farm was also located in “The Lanes” and it was important because it marked the frontier between the Cottages and, as Stephen called it, “no-man’s land”.