Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived

by Penelope Lively

  OLEANDER, JACARANDA

  PENELOPE LIVELY grew up in Egypt but settled in England after the war and took a degree in history at St Anne’s College, Oxford. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a member of PEN and the Society of Authors. She was married to the late Professor Jack Lively, has a daughter, a son and four grandchildren, and lives in London. Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize; once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1994 for According to Mark. She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger. Her other books include Cleopatra’s Sister, Beyond the Blue Mountains, a collection of short stories; Oleander, Jacaranda, a memoir of her childhood days in Egypt; Spiderweb; A House Unlocked, a second autobiographical work; and Heatwave. Penelope Lively has also written radio and television scripts and has acted as presenter for a BBC Radio 4 programme on children’s literature. She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award. She was appointed CBE in the 2001 New Year’s Honours list.

  PENELOPE LIVELY

  Oleander, Jacaranda

  A Childhood Perceived

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published by Viking 1994

  Published in Penguin Books 1995

  Published in Penguin Classics 2006

  1

  Copyright © Penelope Lively, 1994

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

  prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

  which it is published and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  EISBN: 978–0–141–90300–2

  for my children, and for theirs

  Preface

  This is a book about childhood. It is also a discussion of the nature of childhood perception and a view of Egypt in the 1930s and 1940s. My childhood is no more – or less – interesting than anyone else’s. It has two particularities. One is that I was the product of one society but was learning how to perceive the world in the ambience of a quite different culture. I grew up English, in Egypt. The other is that I was cared for by someone who was not my mother, and that it was a childhood which came to an abrupt and traumatic end. In 1945, when I was twelve, my parents were divorced and I was taken to England, and to boarding school. It was to be a grim rite of passage.

  I have tried to recover something of the anarchic vision of childhood – in so far as any of us can do such a thing – and use this as the vehicle for a reflection on the way in which children perceive. I believe that the experience of childhood is irretrievable. All that remains, for any of us, is a headful of brilliant frozen moments, already dangerously distorted by the wisdoms of maturity. But it has seemed to me that it might be possible to take these pictures in the mind – those moments of seeing – and, by turning them into language, to try both to look at the way in which a child sees and at how this matches up with what it was that was seen. And since what was being seen requires explanation and discussion also, I have written of Egypt, and of Palestine and the Sudan – of the reality as well as of my childcentred perception.

  Which raises the question of the nature of reality itself. Definitions of reality depend on who is doing the defining, of course. My view of reality today is very different from the one I held when I was four, or six, or eight – views which were equally valid at the time and in many ways rather more interesting. My adult view of reality is conditioned like anyone else’s by culture and education. The childhood view – like that of any other child – is anarchic, because without preconceptions. When you do not know what to expect of the world – when everything is astonishing – then anything is possible and acceptable. Children are aliens in a landscape that is entirely unpredictable, required to conform to the dictation of a mysterious code while finding their way around a world which is both dazzling and perverse. I wanted to see if it was possible to uncover something of this experience.

  While I was thinking about the writing of this book, and jotting down notes, I had a dream one night which by the light of day seemed so heftily symbolic as to be a parody of the form, so I write it down, though I’m not sure that I would care to try to unravel the various elements of the symbolism. I was in a large barn filled with a mixture of straw, hay and earth – a compacted mass which I felt compelled to excavate. I seemed to be trying to tidy it up in some way. As I dug down I came to a layer which made me uneasy – there were bits of cardboard and plastic and I suspected that something was concealed, something disagreeable. I came upon the handles of a child’s pushchair or buggy, and as I began to pull it out I saw that there was a thing – a figure – sitting in it. A dressed figure – I saw shoes and a sunbonnet. I thought with gathering dismay that this might be a dead child, and I pulled the whole object out and took it to a lighter place where I could inspect it. I didn’t want to do this, but knew that I was somehow bound to. I considered fetching someone to help me, but knew also that I had to do this alone. I put my hand on the sunbonnet and felt something round which I feared was the child’s skull. Then I pulled the bonnet off, and saw that there was simply a doll – a china doll. I had a feeling of immense relief, and went outside the barn where I found a group of people which included my son, and told them what had happened. They shared my relief.

  There it is – raw stuff. Not something I would be capable of inventing, either. And there also is the surreal vision which shares something, it seems to me, with the vision of childhood. The willingness to suspend disbelief. Perhaps there is an eerie affinity between the strange offerings of the subconscious and the unfettered view of the child. It struck me as appropriate that a book which tried to pin down the latter should be heralded by a particularly lurid instance of the former.

  Chapter One

  We are going by car from Bulaq Dakhrur to Heliopolis. I am in the back. The leather of the seat sticks to my bare legs. We travel along a road lined at either side with oleander and jacaranda trees, alternate splashes of white and blue. I chant, quietly: ‘Jacaranda, oleander… Jacaranda, oleander…’ And as I do so there comes to me th
e revelation that in a few hours’ time we shall return by the same route and that I shall pass the same trees, in reverse order – oleander, jacaranda, oleander, jacaranda – and that, by the same token, I can look back upon myself of now, of this moment. I shall be able to think about myself now, thinking this – but it will be then, not now.

  And in due course I did so, and perceived with excitement the chasm between past and future, the perpetual slide of the present. As, writing this, I think with equal wonder of that irretrievable child, and of the eerie relationship between her mind and mine. She is myself, but a self which is unreachable except by means of such miraculously surviving moments of being: the alien within.

  *

  Here is a child thinking about time, experiencing a sudden illumination about chronology and a person’s capacity for recollection. In terms of developmental psychology, this would be seen as significant, an indication of a particular achievement – the ability to be actively concerned with the general nature of things. But the findings and the discussion of developmental psychology can make oddly frustrating reading – they reflect the process of scientific observation and are hence illuminating, but they seem to have no apparent bearing on the rainbow experience we have all lost, but of which we occasionally retrieve a brilliant glimpse. I know now what was going on in my head that day over fifty years ago. I can turn the cold eye of adult knowledge and experience upon the moment and interpret it in the light of a lifetime’s reading and reflection. But what seems most astonishing of all is that something of the reality of the moment survives this destructive freight of wisdom and rationality, firmly hitched to the physical world. In my mind, there is still the tacky sensation of the leather car-seat which sticks to the back of my knees. I see still the bright flower-laden trees. I roll the lavish names around on the tongue: ‘Jacaranda, oleander…’ For this is an incident infused with the sense of language quite as much as with a perception of the nature of time: the possession and control of these decorative words, the satisfaction of being able to say them, display them. Though all of it was done, I know, in privacy: this interesting perception, the significance of it and the excitement, had to be mine alone, uncommunicated. And now, appropriately, the adult with whom I share it is myself.

  We would have been going to visit friends, driving from our home four miles west of the centre of Cairo to Heliopolis, the eastern suburb, a journey which meant traversing the city – a slow and incident-strewn navigation amid trams and donkey-carts and pedestrians. Cairo was traffic-ridden, as now, but it was a less daunting traffic than the ceaseless roar of today. The population of Cairo was then just over 1 million, as compared with the 14 million of today. Bulaq Dakhrur, where we lived, was a mud village in open fields, with, just beyond it, three substantial European-owned houses surrounded by large gardens, one of which was ours.

  Bulaq el Dakhrur, correctly. We curtailed the name, using it to mean both the place and our own home. And it was in its correct form that it leaped at me from road signs almost forty years later, on my first return to Egypt. It was not a place now, but an area, a part of Cairo’s sprawling extension. The city’s teeming dun-coloured spread had gobbled up the fields of berseem and sugar-cane, the villages, and presumably our home. I was prepared for this, and thought it unlikely that it could still exist. But I had come there partly to look for it.

  It was my first return to Egypt. Over the years it had somehow never been possible – either too expensive, or impracticable. But the 1980s brought the expansion of the Egyptian tourist industry and the benefaction of relatively cheap tours, and thus it was that I went back as a tourist, packaged up the Nile along with Jack, my husband, and our friends Ann and Anthony Thwaite. We had three days in Cairo, during which we had planned the search for Bulaq Dakhrur. I did not know how to find it, except that you went west out of Cairo, over a railway line by way of a level crossing, and then on a bit and it was to the left. The population of the Bulaq el Dakhrur area was now around a quarter of a million, we had been told.

  I had an introduction to an Arabic-speaking Cairo resident, Cordelia Salter, who gamely agreed to come with us as translator. We set off from the Ramses Hilton in a taxi, whose driver accepted with enthusiasm the proposal of this eccentric quest. A few hours before, in the hotel room, I had dialled the phone number that has been in my head all my life: 96245. A discontinued line. Of course.

  We reached the railway line. The level crossing was automated now. Was this the place at which we used to sit in the car, waiting for the anticipated arrival and eventual interminable passage of a goods train? We would be there for half an hour, sometimes, slotted into a long impatient line of carts and trucks, with those who could hooting continuously, others bawling at the signalmen, and anyone on foot climbing over the barrier and crawling under the train, which was frequently stationary. I studied the new, efficient-looking arrangement and suddenly it came to me that just beyond the railway line there should be a canal, and indeed there was. But now the road curved off to the right in a way that seemed to me wrong. There was a sea of shabbily built apartment blocks on all sides, balconies festooned with washing, the street strewn with rubble, people everywhere, children running around like puppies, more of the same visible down every alley. I began to feel like a time traveller, seeing still the white-dappled clover fields and the waving sugar-cane.

  Definitely, the road was going too far to the right. We stopped the taxi and the driver did some astute thinking and vanished into a coffee-house to see if he could find some old men who would remember this area way back and who might know if there were still any large old houses surviving. He returned, triumphant. Yes, someone had said there were houses that used to belong to English people, but not on this road, which was built in 1970. Over to the left. Down that way… Vague gesturing.

  We set off again, plunging now down pot-holed side roads, the taxi moving amid the rubble at a walking pace. We began to acquire an interested following. Passers-by interrogated the taxi driver. The news of our mission spread and the following increased. We acquired a man wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase – an incongruous figure in these parts – who offered to act as escort. We were now seven in the taxi. At every street junction – if such they could be called – the driver stopped once more. Consultations were held. People pointed, in various directions. Others shook their heads dismissively. We were all by now hot and tired.

  And then someone said very positively: ‘Down there…’ The street indicated was wider than most, but so ferociously pot-holed that it seemed wise to take to our feet. We walked a hundred yards or so, escorted by our entourage which had swollen to twenty or thirty. And there suddenly was a large, very dilapidated house which certainly had a whiff of familiarity. A pillared porch, green shutters… But it didn’t seem right. I studied it. Everyone else watched me, expectantly. ‘No,’ I said unhappily, ‘I don’t think it is.’

  We continued. Beyond the building was a newish mosque surrounded by tenements. And then a bit of waste ground and then… There it was. Bulaq Dakhrur. Standing there battered but alive, the old shutters still on most of the windows, the big veranda at the back, the front porch, the whole infinitely familiar outline that has featured in my dreams for forty years. I said, ‘This is it.’

  Beaming smiles all round. My companions emotional. The entourage congratulating each other, and me. The first house we came to, I now realized, had been that of our then neighbours. The middle house of the three had been replaced by the mosque and Bulaq Dakhrur stood isolated, fenced off behind railings with a gate at which appeared a gaffir, who opened up at once with broad smiles when all was explained. The house was now the administrative offices of a technical school, apparently – and there in what had once been our garden were the concrete block-houses which were the workshops and classrooms. But it was the lunch hour and there was no one around. We trooped into the precincts, all fifty of us, and I led a sort of royal progress round the outside of the house, taking photographs, while found
er members of our entourage explained to latecomers what it was all about. The man with the briefcase presided benignly, as if it had all been his doing. Everyone shook hands with everyone else. It was not possible to go inside because it was locked up. I didn’t really want to anyway. This was quite enough. The gaffir had been associated with the place for long enough to know something of its past. He launched on an explanation to our companion interpreter, pointing to an open space filled with rubbish, cats and playing children – and as he pointed I saw a rectangle of razed concrete walling, with a shallow square pit alongside it, like archaeological remains. The fragments of our swimming-pool and the engine-house in which lived our electricity generator.

  Of the surroundings, everything had gone. The fields, the village, the palm-fringed canals. Our garden, with its thirty-foot eucalyptus trees, the lawns, the ponds, the pergolas. Nothing left but the house, stolidly clinging on. Somehow, this was not sad but curiously exhilarating. I had not expected it to be there at all. And now the building seemed in some odd way to have the dignity of the Sphinx, which looks aloofly out over the degradation all around. Bulaq Dakhrur did not seem aloof – quite comfortable indeed, rather like a person who has settled to changed circumstances but does not abandon identity. And to be the only person to have known it both then and now gave me a strange sensation of complicity with a physical object – as though it had the intimacy of life.

  There were more complex reactions, too. I felt as though a piece of myself were there, and that I had come back to fetch it. A wave of happiness; a sense of completion. And there was also the powerful feeling that on some other plane of existence the Ur-house was still there also, with the eucalyptus avenue and the lawns and the flower beds, and I with it, a ghost-child for ever riding my bike up and down the drive, or trailing around after the gardeners, or reading in my vine hammock in the hedge hideaway.