Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived

by Penelope Lively

  And thus I squat in the dust, unconsciously imitating the way in which Abdul and Hassan sit, and listen to their conversation which I cannot understand, except for odd words here and there. And so, today, at some deep level, the sound of spoken Arabic is still homely and familiar. I watch Hassan’s deft fingers flying over the carcass of a chicken, I study the complexity of his face with its ritual gashes on the cheeks, deep grooves on the plum-dark skin. Hassan is from Nubia, as is Daoud, the tall spindly suffragi. Hassan is nice – he smiles and laughs. Mansour, the head gardener, is dour and grim. I am nervous of him and keep well out of his way. He once saw me snapping off poinsettia heads and shopped me to my mother. There was a great row and I was banned from that part of the garden.

  All these people have strong and definite personalities for me. Abdul, the head suffragi, is a figure of status and authority; he is grave but also kindly. I take him very seriously and always do what he says. Daoud, on the other hand, is a clown – he fools about. He invites horseplay and repartee. Hassan is amiable and jokey. Mansour is unapproachable and not to be trusted. Ahmed is the garden boy; he is my friend. I am in a relationship with each of these which is unlike my relationship with anyone else – with the family, or with my parents’ friends. It is an intimate one, but is also somehow bewildering. I do not know quite where I am.

  I realize now how this mirrors the Victorian or Edwardian household in which children and servants exist in a stratum of their own, locked into a relationship rich with ambiguities. The world of Ivy Compton-Burnett and, most accurately of all, of Lewis Carroll. I have always warmed to that interpretation which sees Alice’s anarchic vision as an attempt to penetrate the confusing codes of an adult world in which the roles of adults themselves are shifty and unreliable – authoritative at one moment, servile at the next. Reading today of the White Rabbit or the Red Queen, I see myself sitting in the bushes outside the kitchen door at Bulaq Dakhrur, observing Abdul and Hassan and Mansour.

  I have met up with Ahmed in the place behind the bamboo clump, both of us in flight from authority – I from Lucy, he from Mansour.

  ‘I dare you to eat earth,’ says Ahmed. ‘Look…’

  He scoops up a handful of earth, grinning. He crams it into his mouth.

  I watch, stonily, waiting for him to expire. He does not. ‘Now you,’ challenges Ahmed, grinning hugely.

  I am in a fix. If I do it, I will surely die. If I do not, I shall lose face, irrevocably.

  There is really no choice. I gather a handful of earth, shove it into my mouth. My teeth grind on the gritty bits. I swallow.

  Ahmed would have been about twelve, I think. Certainly he was not much taller than I was (there would have been good reason for that) and his voice had not broken. He was Mansour’s minion, employed to fetch and carry and to do those tasks beneath the dignity of Mansour and Ali. Most of his time was spent sweeping paths in a desultory way, with bursts of frenzied activity whenever Mansour hove into view. And the earth-eating episode is again of course embellished with a touch of hindsight. The conversation cannot have run quite like that – there was a language barrier. Suffice it that we understood each other perfectly.

  This infrastructure of service seems astonishing, for one small family. It was in no way unusual. All European families would have had one or two or more servants. So, equally, would Egyptian families of any prosperity at all. The bulk of the population were fellaheen; most of those who were not were engaged in ministering to the merchant and administrative classes, whether foreign or indigenous. Again, it seems more like another century than another place.

  Beyond the house, and all around it, was the garden, which was largely my mother’s creation. I suspect that an addiction to gardening is genetic. My maternal grandmother was a dedicated gardener, and had created a memorable garden in West Somerset, strongly influenced by Gertrude Jekyll. My mother made an equally distinguished garden in Egypt. Now I have the fever, though without their resources of time and space, and so has my daughter. The gardens have become increasingly modest, down the generations, but the obsession continues. The Bulaq Dakhrur garden was unashamedly English in design – it had lawns and a lily pond with a willow, pergolas and formal beds and a rose garden. But the flowers were zinnias and canna lilies and poinsettias, the shrubs were lantana and plumbago and bougainvillaea. There was a long pergola over an intersecting brick path and a round pergola above a concrete basin with a bronze statue of Mercury in the middle.

  The Mercury basin is empty of water. It is cracked, making the surface uneven, and there is a scum of leaves in the bottom. I ride my bicycle round and round it, as around a Wall of Death at a fun-fair. This is thrilling and hazardous – there is always the risk of falling off.

  Looking at a photograph of the Mercury basin, it seems to me that the diameter is only some five or six feet. A small bicycle, it must have been. A small child. My perspective of that space is dizzily distorted. I see it with double vision – the reality of the photograph in front of me, and that inward eye which insists upon a sweeping expanse, a great curve around which I hurtle. Both, though, are accurate. It is I who am the inconstant feature.

  There was a water garden – a shady place with channels and bridges and a central island thick with bamboo. This was a particular haven of mine. There were frogs and tadpoles and goldfish and the whole place lent itself perfectly to complex naval games with craft made out of bits of plank nailed together which I played with my friend and neighbour Steven Hurst.

  The Hursts lived next door. Steven’s father worked for the Egyptian government as Director General of the Ministry of Irrigation. Their large garden adjoined ours. Steven was a year older than me, and together we led a rich and creative life in this extended territory, based on an expedient pooling of our respective skills. I was good at inventing the games we should play; Steven excelled at making the requisite props. I devised the naval game; Steven acquired planks, nails and a hammer – illicitly no doubt – and made the ships. There was another elaborate game which centred on a wooden packing-case. This involved bows and arrows – also made by Steven – and had overtones of pioneer life. Goodness knows what was the inspiration for this. A photograph records this activity. There we are, sitting outside our packing-case house, Steven on a chair holding the bow, me on the ground holding the arrow (as squaw, presumably). We both look rather cross, and I know why, because I remember the taking of the photograph. We had been made to stop what we were doing and pose; we resented the interruption. And once again there is an unnerving conflict between what is in my head and what I see in this old photograph. There, I see two quite small children and an upturned packing-case. But memory supplies something entirely different – an impression of mature preoccupation, of significant business rudely broken into by importunate outsiders. And the packing-case is not a packing-case but a house. It has doors and windows and furnishings, smoke comes from the chimney. Outside, the buffalo roam. Or something of the kind. At any rate, I know that the camera lies. It is not thus at all.

  Steven and his family left Egypt in 1941, long before we did. Another family moved in next door, with children somewhat younger than I was who could not offer a substitute for that creative relationship. Throughout the 1940s I was distinctly short on companionship. I had a bonanza in the summer, on the beaches of Alexandria, but for the rest of the year I only saw other children when my mother drove Lucy and me in to Cairo and left us at Gezira Sporting Club for the afternoon, where we made hay for a few hours – Lucy indulging in a good gossip with her friends and I rampaging with their charges. Very occasionally special friends came out to Bulaq Dakhrur. Margaret, who was my age exactly, with plaits and pink cheeks. And an exuberant small Irish boy called Peter, richly freckled and, according to Lucy, uncontrollable. I was much taken with Peter. Once, he came to stay and we were allowed to sleep in adjacent beds. Lucy put the light out, with awful admonitions that there was to be no talking and no getting out of bed. After a few minutes, I heard a rhythmic creakin
g and squeaking. Peter had discovered the possibilities of determined bouncing on the spring bedstead which was topped only by a thin flock mattress. I had never thought of this. I too bounced. We bounced in unison until Lucy erupted from the nursery, looking thunder.

  But this was an exceptional event. For the most part I was significantly alone, thrown on to my own resources of communion with trees and guinea-pigs backed up by a practised system of internal fantasy. After Steven left, the packing-case house fell into disuse and the water-garden navy rotted away. But there is a curious coda to our relationship, involving the sort of coincidence that no novelist would be allowed to get away with. Life is far more fortuitous than fiction.

  We lost touch entirely. In 1975 I was living in a village outside Oxford with my husband and children. Attached to our sixteenth-century farmhouse was a tithe barn, then semi-derelict and the property of a local farmer. We heard that this barn had been sold to a sculptor, who was intending to restore it and live and work there. One day there was a knock at the door – our future neighbour had called by to introduce himself. It was Steven – now metamorphosed into the sculptor Steve Hurst. And thus we became next-door neighbours and friends all over again, half a world away and half a lifetime on.

  We had a swimming-pool at Bulaq Dakhrur. This sounds grander than it in fact was. The swimming-pool was a rectangle of raised concrete, just big enough and deep enough for an adult to dive into without hitting the bottom or the other side. It had murky green depths and a permanent scum of eucalyptus pollen. A jocular Eighth Hussar had once spent a morning persuading me that there was a Nile catfish down there (’Great big fellow – felt his whiskers against my leg…’) and on one occasion a little snake came whipping through the eucalyptus pollen towards me while Lucy, who couldn’t swim, keened in dismay from the edge. I yearned for the glimmering turquoise wastes of the pool at Gezira Sporting Club, with its tiers of diving boards and ripe miasma of Nivea cream.

  The drive which led past the big lawn to the house was lined on one side with immensely tall eucalyptus trees. The maintenance of it all occupied Mansour, Ali and Ahmed day in and day out the year round and its survival depended, like the surrounding fields, on the periodic release of water from the canal system. Once a month the banks of the ditch which bordered our property on one side were breached in several places by Ali – always a dramatic and ceremonial business – and the brown waters gushed out all over the garden, inundating it to a depth of a couple of inches. ‘The flood’, this ritual event was called – and in my mind it was associated inextricably with the biblical Flood, which I imagined to have been similar, if a bit deeper. I was confined to the veranda and the paths until the waters sank, bitterly watching Ahmed who sploshed around barefoot in the glorious cool mud, grinning complacently at me.

  Once a year a further ritual took place – an esoteric form of spring-cleaning. The snake charmer came. He was brought out from Cairo by my father in the car and immediately taken off to be thoroughly searched – a demeaning procedure much relished by the servants, who carried it out, and in no way objected to by the snake charmer, who expected it. Everybody knew – the snake charmer included – that inferior practitioners arrived with their quarry concealed about their persons, to be produced with a flourish at the appropriate moment. To submit with dignity to the search was simply to make the point that he was not of this order. And then, the search over, he got going – followed by the entire household in a Pied Piper procession, my parents, Lucy and myself, any guests invited out for the spectacle, all the servants. It was a festival, as well as a necessary purgation.

  He began with the garden. He walked ahead of us, chanting softly, apparently to himself. He would pause, consider. He would continue, pause again. The chanting would get louder. And then he would shoot a skinny brown arm out of the sleeve of his galabiya up into the foliage of the pergola, or on to the overhanging branch of a tree, and there would be a snake, whipping and thrashing in his grasp. The snake would be encouraged to slash at his sleeve with its fangs – to drain the poison, I imagine – and was then dropped into the sack tied to his waist. And on we went, with everyone speculating sagely as to how it was done. He smelled them out, being endowed with some extra sense inconceivable to the rest of us. He mesmerized them with the chanting, forcing them to rustle and betray their presence. He was in collusion with the servants, who had planted the snakes half an hour previously (this last suggested by cynical visitors and hotly refuted by my parents). I still don’t know the secret of it, but it happened, and was vastly satisfying to all concerned. Except, I dare say, the snakes.

  Having cleansed the garden, the snake charmer would then ask to go into the house. My mother would say that it was quite out of the question that there were any snakes in the house. The snake charmer would insist that he knew that there were. We would go inside. And then the real fun began. The snake charmer proceeded from room to room, intoning. The chanting would become louder and faster. My mother’s ‘I told you so’ expression would change to one of incredulity. On different occasions snakes were produced from the cupboard under the stairs, the record cabinet and, memorably, from under our bath.

  I was entranced by snakes and impervious to warnings. The most serious erosion of all freedoms, in my view, was the rule that you could never go barefoot in the desert because of sand-vipers. Even now, the feeling of sand on bare feet has for me an extra dimension of sybaritic delight. Many of our garden snakes would have been venomous to a greater or lesser degree, but I spent much time hunting for them – unsuccessfully for the most part – and yearned most of all for a sighting of a cobra, rumoured still to exist in small numbers in Lower Egypt. There had after all been the Crusader sword episode; next time, I wanted to be on the spot. The ultimate treat of the snake charmer’s visits was that I would be allowed to keep a small harmless snake. I would carry it about in the pocket of my dress for days, ignoring Lucy’s revulsion and admonitions, until the poor thing escaped.

  We went in to Cairo only once a week, sometimes less often. The garden was my universe. I knew every inch of it and was involved in innumerable private communions. There were the places where I hid myself – the bamboo patch on the pond island, the hummock of vine branches in the hedge by the swimming-pool. There were favoured plants and bushes: the arum lilies by the pond with their thick central tubes which could be illicitly snapped off and made into a sort of pencil, the fat buds of the fuchsias which could be popped. But the eucalyptus trees in the drive were the most crucial of all. I knew each one intimately – the smooth trunks from which the bark would peel in strips, the long crisp greenish-blue leaves which smelled of eucalyptus if you scrunched them in your hand, the little conical seeds which released that powdery dust. The central and tallest tree had a large misshapen lump a foot or so across on its trunk, at about my head height. This seemed to imbue it with some mystical power. I revered this tree. I communed with it, most definitely. I would sit for hours between its spreading roots, telling it things. I complained to it, and went to it for consolation and reassurance.

  The capacity for animistic belief lies deep. I find it extremely interesting, but only in an anthropological or mythological sense. I am a hard-headed woman nowadays and would not be able to read the works of W. H. Hudson or Richard Jeffries without wincing. I cannot now imagine having a relationship with a tree other than an environmentally protective one or one of aesthetic pleasure. Nevertheless, there lurks within me somewhere the spirit of a person who once quite naturally and unquestioningly communed with a thirty-foot eucalyptus tree.

  Solitary children are no doubt even more prone than others to seek animistic solace. I communed also with an array of animals – principally my collection of tortoises and a large herd of guinea-pigs. The guinea-pigs were satisfying as well in another and far less mystical way. I was a child reared on the King James Version of the Bible, especially the Old Testament. Guinea-pigs breed with biblical intensity – they will descend unto the fourth generation withi
n a year. I saw mine as an intriguing biological expression of the proceedings of the Old Testament and charted their genealogies accordingly – who begat whom all laid out neatly in a family tree on the nursery wall, with ruled lines and my best writing. Though the orderly effect was muddied here and there by outbreaks of rampant incest. The guinea-pigs were individually named, with groupings of names to indicate families – admirals for one lot, Nelson, Drake, Jellicoe and so on – contemporary aircraft for a cadet line, Spitfire, Hurricane, Liberator. I wonder now why I didn’t carry things to a logical conclusion and plunder the Old Testament for names; probably Lucy balked at that – there would have been implications of blasphemy.

  Most young children take a pretty animistic line where domestic pets are concerned. For a number of years I was one of the judging panel for the largest children’s creative-writing competition in this country and came to realize that the central concern of the nation’s under-eight-year-olds is hamsters. Cats and dogs came next, with budgies doing quite well too. And the writing quite often suggested not only an attribution of human responses, but a distinct emotional need. Animals had a role: they were surrogates, or icons. I’m not so sure about trees. My particular tendency to relate to the surroundings seems perhaps the personal solution of an extremely solitary child – no siblings, the company of other children exceptional rather than normal. But it still remains part of a general capacity, an ability to fuse with the physical world which we lose in adult life just as we lose that capacity for intense and unadulterated observation. Does this then mean that animistic belief is childlike or that children have an insight into some primal state of unity with the natural world?