Images and Shadows

by Iris Origo

  In all these plans his wife, as resilient, as irrepressibly active as he, fully shared. ‘It fills us with excitement’, he wrote. ‘Sybil will come in and say to me: “Oh, I’ve been reading a fascinating chapter by Milner, he’s the most extraordinary man” … And the days pass peacefully in discussion of the Debt or of irrigation, out in the pine-woods of Camaldoli.’

  So, in December 1909, sailing up the Nile on a private dahabeah (this luxury being a gift from my American grandfather) my parents—travelling with their own doctor, Freddie Bishop, their close friend Gordon Gardiner, myself and my governess—returned to Egypt for the last time.

  ‘We start with a crew of ten,’ wrote my father, ‘and one of these is a singer—his only function being to sing while the crew work or row. He is treated with great consideration, for if he is at all discontented, none of the crew will work, and as a result he is insufferable. Like all singers here, he is a great opium-eater, and as yellow as a Chinaman.’

  The first weeks in Egypt were full of activity and hope. In Cairo my father was able to collect some political information, incidentally discovering that in order to get to Government House it was still necessary to ask for Beit-el-Lord, The House of the Lord (a name going back to the days of Lord Cromer, the Lord par excellence), and at Minia, too, he was able to interview the Moudir and a young Englishman representing the Finance Department. ‘It will be our own fault’, he wrote, ‘if we don’t make something of this.’

  As for the journey itself:

  ‘A sailing dahabeah,’ he wrote, ‘knocks a steamer into a cocked hat. A tug is necessary, one only makes 2½ to 3½ miles with it, against this current, but the motion is delicious—you don’t perceive that you are moving … The charm of the Nile is as great as the first time, and the interest greater. It is all perfection. This winter, under these conditions, is an absolute test of what climate and rest can do.’

  By mid-December we were anchored beside a wide, lonely valley a few miles before Assiut, with high cliffs on either side. Here a camp was pitched, consisting of two tents in which my father and mother slept, a day-house of matting thatched with palm-leaves, and a shelter for their live-stock: three donkeys, some turkeys, a cow, and ‘the sheik of the cow’. The rest of us slept on board. Along the shore stretched a band of some fifty yards of cultivated land of the emerald green of Egypt, and beyond was the desert—still, majestic, lonely. At night a couple of Kaffirs with guns guarded the camp from jackals, wolves, and thieves.

  I remember this camp very well. In the early mornings, before the sun was high, I would go out riding in the desert on my white donkey, which wore a wide necklace of turquoise blue beads to keep off the evil eye. Then I would ‘do lessons’ with my Swiss governess, Mademoiselle Nigg, in a shady corner of the deck, and gradually, as the sun rose higher and my head drooped over my book, the figures of Sophie and Maître Corbeau faded into a landscape of tawny rocks and shimmering sand, while the voice of Mademoiselle was drowned by the low monotonous chant of the Nubian ship-boys, rowing out to us with the provisions and the mail. The boat would bump against the ship’s side—a grinning white-turbaned figure would bring me a bunch of bananas—and then, as the mid-day breeze sprang up, the river would be studded with little white or orange sails. Close beside our ship a woman was bending down, to fill her water-jar, and a little further off, a group of fuzzy-headed Bishareen children were dancing like small black devils round a blind beggar.

  ‘Mais voyons, Iris, tu ne fais pas attention! Qu’est-ce qu’il disait, Maître Renard?”

  No, I was not paying attention. For, by the camp on the shore, I had just seen my mother returning on her camel from her morning ride, her long green veil floating back from her sun-helmet, and there was my father coming to his tent-door to meet her. Soon, after my siesta, I would join him, too, for every day I was allowed to spend an hour in his tent, while he read aloud to me or told me stories. From his letters that I have read since, half a century later, I now realise how strong a current of grief and anxiety must have underlain those hours, how much he wondered what was going to happen to the child whom he read to and played with and gently laughed at—but never kissed.

  Later on I discovered that, in the Will he drew up then, he tried to ensure for me what he considered the best of all gifts, a measure of independence, by a small legacy to come into my hands at eighteen and a larger one at thirty ‘so that she may be able to decide her own life, whether married or not’. In a long letter to my mother, written shortly before his death, he said that his chief wish for me was that I should be brought up ‘free from all this national feeling which makes people so unhappy. Bring her up somewhere where she does not belong, then she can’t have it. I’d rather France or Italy than England, so that she can really be cosmopolitan, deep down … She must be English now, just as she’d have been more American if I’d lived and not you. That is natural and right. But I’d like her to be a little “foreign”, too, so that, when she grows up, she really will be free to love and marry anyone she likes, of any country, without its being difficult.’ This letter was shown to me by my mother many years later, after I had grown up in Italy and was engaged to an Italian. But of what my father said to me in those last days, as I sat on the carpet of his tent beside his day-bed, I have only the haziest recollection. He was learning some of Shakespeare’s sonnets by heart and he recited some of them to me, in accordance with his belief that it is not necessary, nor even desirable, for a child to understand all that is said to it: the sights should always be placed just a little too high. He taught me poker-patience, too, and wrote with amused pride to his father about my skill. ‘I think she will have a card mind.’ But what I remember best is his voice itself, and his quick smile, and the intense feeling of companionship and well-being, as I leaned against his knee while the last story or poem drew to an end, while through the open flap of the tent, the sky changed to gold and green and the rocky hill grew darker. Then a lean, dog-like shape was suddenly outlined against the sky, the first jackal’s shrill yelp broke the stillness, and it was time to say goodnight.

  At Christmas my father was a little better, and Iskander Haik—our dignified, gentle, omniscient Syrian dragoman—prepared a Christmas party on board. I can still recall the wonder of being up so late on the deck festooned with bright paper garlands, the songs of the boatmen, the scents of the Eastern night and the bright lights of the Christmas-tree beneath the stars. I myself was dressed in a Turkish fancy-dress with long trousers of white gauze and an embroidered gold jacket, which my mother had brought me from Constantinople, and in the cabin the grown-ups, too, had improvised some kind of fancy-dress. Even my father had a white turban and my mother a shimmering dress, and the ship-boys their best scarlet sashes over their long white gowns. There were crackers and toasts and presents and songs—until the flickering lights of the Christmas-tree and the stars in the sky and their reflections in the river were all blurred in my sleepy eyes, and I was carried below to fall asleep to the sound of more singing and of the Nile lapping against our keel.

  That was the last untroubled evening. It had already become evident that the violent alternations of cold and heat, which at first had seemed so bracing, and the strong, cold sand-laden desert winds, were as dangerous for my father as they have proved for many other invalids. Four days after Christmas he had another haemorrhage, and in a faint pencilled scrawl, to reassure his father, he wrote: ‘I hope my little haemorrhages no longer give you the same horror as at first. To me they are merely a nuisance.’

  Dr. Bishop, however, was not so sanguine, and as soon as possible we sailed on to Assuan, within reach of medical help and hotels. There we pitched another camp in a little bay on the west branch of the river, beyond Elephantine Island, out of sight of the town, but looking on one side towards a wide golden valley leading to the open desert. ‘It is really almost a pleasure,’ he wrote to his father from his cabin, ‘to lie in bed in such a beautiful place.’

  His friend, Gordon Gardiner, wr
ote later on to his parents: ‘I think that the little cabin, the shining river, the palms and the desert, the sense of isolation which fell with the night and with the calls of the jackals and wolves—I think that all these things appealed to him, and that he liked to feel the touch of adventure which always supports a true traveller.’

  By then my governess and I had been moved to a hotel on the mainland, and my English grandparents, realising how dangerously ill my father was, had come there to join us. On his worst days I could not, of course, see my father, but as soon as he was a little better the rowing-boat came to take me across the Nile to the dahabeah, and I spent an hour by his bed, or, when he was too weak for even that, stood for a minute or two at his cabin door.

  ‘Yesterday I saw him for just one second,’ I wrote to my American grandfather. ‘He seemed a little better, he smiled and said that I was an excellent child.’

  I do not think that his appearance or manner can have changed much, for I remember no sense of strangeness or apprehension (though from this I may have been protected by the egocentricity of childhood) but I do recollect the intense excitement on each occasion of the long row across the Nile and around the island, waiting to see him.

  The next memory is of an afternoon two or three days before my father’s death. My grandfather, too, had suddenly fallen ill, with one of the sudden high fevers that so often attack European travellers to Egypt, and I remember Gran taking me into his room, where he lay in bed with his eyes closed, and saying briskly:

  “Gabba is ill, darling. I am going to your mother, and you must stay with him. Sit quite still on that chair, give him a glass of barley-water if he wants it, ring the bell if he tells you to, and don’t talk.”

  For two hours I sat there—filled, I fear, not with anxiety but self-importance. When my grandmother came back, her eyes were red. But it was only two or three days later, returning from another visit, that she took me on her knee and gently told me that my father was dead.

  Even then, I did not really understand. I cried a little, because Gran so plainly expected it, and my governess cried too, and tied a black sash on my white frock; and the stout Italian housemaid whispered “Povera piccola!” As I walked demurely down the long hotel passages to my supper I was thinking almost exclusively about my black sash.

  “I am an orphan,” I said to myself, “like Sophie.”

  It was many years, remembering that self-picturing, before I could refrain from blushing. Indeed, I was right to blush and should do so still, for one form of self-picturing or another has been one of my greatest weaknesses all my life. All that I have learned since then is that it is a sign of insecurity and of vanity—but not necessarily of a cold heart.

  My mother rightly considered that I was too young to go to the funeral, though later on, before leaving, I was taken to see my father’s grave in the stark, lonely little cemetery outside the town, separated only by a low white wall from the desert and the rocks, where he lay beside a few English officers and soldiers who had died in the Sudan, most of them as young as he and nearly as far away from their native land. On the day after his death, I was taken to my mother, in the tent that had stood beside my father’s; his had already been taken down. She tried to take me in her arms but I drew away from her tears and ran back to the boat. I looked into my father’s cabin and into all the other cabins; they were all empty. Without a word, I ran to the ship’s side and signalled that I wanted to be lifted into the rowing-boat; swiftly, in silence, the Nubians rowed me ashore. The hot desert wind, the Khamsin, had sprung up and as I climbed up the short hill back to the hotel, it blew the burning sand into my eyes. I became acquainted then with loneliness and grief.

  How can one measure what might have been? Often in my childhood I cried for my father; often, later on, I thought, ‘If he had been there, I would not have made this or that mistake.’ Reading his letters and talking to his friends, I can see some of the characteristics that I may owe to him; a natural affinity with the Latin world (one that was always closed, in spite of her love of Italian landscape and art, to my mother), an interest in many different kinds of ideas and people; a satisfaction in tackling intellectual problems (though not with equal brilliance) and also, the sharp, sudden impatience which his illness made so much more excusable in him than in me. But what the later years of our friendship might have brought, I shall never know.

  His greatest gift to me was assuredly that he became the personification of a myth. A large part of childhood is spent in a legendary world, peopled by myths and heroes: it is through them that beauty and valour are first apprehended. But it is generally a shadowy, secret domain, wholly cut off from life. When, however, a child can translate his myth into terms of reality and can recollect his hero in flesh and blood, the vision is unified: virtue and valour walk upon this earth.

  1 He left all his books and papers about the case to Harvard, where his father also founded a History scholarship in his memory.

  2 I remember hearing similar comments from people who did relief work, several years later, in the earthquake of the Abruzzi. But certainly this was not so, in my experience, after the devastating flood in Florence in 1966. Here, during the first week before the extent of the disaster was realised elsewhere, the early stages of relief and reconstruction were undertaken entirely by the Florentines themselves, with a courage, an absence of self-pity, a kindness and a sense of humour beyond all praise—digging in the stinking mud and rubble, distributing food and water and drugs, blankets and clothing, salvaging works of art and precious manuscripts, saving old people and patients in hospitals who had been marooned. Communists working beside parish priests, Red Cross nurses beside young students. Later on, of course, generous help came from all over Italy and Europe, but for the first week Florence stood and worked alone; and it was the tenacity, endurance and resourcefulness of her workmen and craftsmen that set their city upon her feet again.

  4

  My Mother

  In my early childhood, my father and my English grandfather were the presiding deities; my mother being, in my recollection, either a reclining figure upon a sofa or a moving one, waving goodbye from a car. It was not until after the age of ten that I began to discover what she was like—or at least what the facet was like which was turned to a child’s eye. After two years of widowhood she was still (as I now realise) only thirty, a young woman just awakening, in the freedom and independence of her new life in Italy, to the full flowering of her own personality. All my memories of her, during those early years in Florence, are coloured by her intense vitality, her infectious eagerness. Though she had little regular beauty of feature, the brightness of her hair, of the colour of burnished brass rather than gold, and never faded either by illness or old age, the clear china-blue of her round childlike eyes, the swiftness of her speech and movements, the gay colours she chose for her clothes, gave the effect of a humming-bird or a kingfisher, always in flight. Her clothes, too, then seemed to me extremely beautiful: I can still remember a scarlet duvetyn cloak, a little black velvet tricorne with a Cavalier’s sweeping feather, and, in the evening, a succession of the Fortuny tea-gowns which had then just come into fashion: long straight gowns of finely pleated heavy silk, girdled like those of figures in a Greek frieze, or coats of velvet and brocade, in the designs and colours of Venetian or Florentine Renaissance pictures—sapphire and crimson, deep green and gold. Dressed myself in the suitable ‘pinafore-frocks’ (dark blue or purple serge in winter, pale green or blue linen in summer) which had replaced the white muslins of my earlier childhood, I felt her clothes to be as dazzling and unattainable as the swiftness of her mind.

  Sybil with Iris

  As I grew a little older, however, I began to gather courage. Although not really a child-lover and content to delegate the routine of my daily life to her maid or to a succession of governesses, my mother had a remarkable gift for awakening a child’s imagination: everything she told or showed one was exciting, because it clearly delighted her, too. I
t was in her company that I discovered the two greatest pleasures of my childhood, which have endured for my whole life—the pleasures of travel and of books. I would come down after tea in the ‘sala degli uccelli’—the Chinese drawing-room papered with exotic birds and flowers—and there, lying in her Fortuny tea-gown on the sofa of greyish-blue brocade, she would read aloud to me in her quick breathless voice. “Shall it be St. Agnes’ Eve today, or Kubla Khan?” Like Charles Lamb, she believed in awakening ‘that beautiful interest in wild tales which makes a child a man, while all the time he suspects himself to be no bigger than a child’—and indeed her own enjoyment was still as untarnished, as childlike, as mine.

  A few years later, when she was compiling an anthology, The Book of the Sea, I not only helped her with the mechanical tasks of copying and typewriting but with the work of research and selection. I would come into her bedroom (for a lingering form of jaundice kept her in bed for the whole of that winter) with some new find, generally in French or Italian, for with her own knowledge of English poetry I could not compete. On one day it would be a Piedmontese ballad, O marinar della marina, on another, a Breton sailor’s prayer, Protégez-moi, mon Seigneur: mon navire est si petit et votre mer est si grande, or perhaps (for by then my classical education had begun) a fragment of the Homeric hymn to Castor and Pollux, or an epitaph from the Greek Anthology: ‘Not dust nor the light weight of a stone, but all the sea that thou beholdest is the tomb of Eurisippus …’—“Oh darling, that is a find!”