The House in Norham Gardens - Penelope Lively - Bog

No 40 Norham Gardens, Oxford, is the home of Clare Mayfield, her two aged aunts and two lodgers. In the junk room, Clare discovers the vividly painted shield which her great-grandfather, an eminent anthropologist, had brought back from New Guinea. She becomes obsessed with its past and determined to find out more about its strange tribal origins.