Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived

by Penelope Lively

  Chapter Three

  When I was very young I was under the impression that Lucy had a large black hole in the middle of her chest – a belief inspired I imagine by glimpses of that shadowed cleft between a woman’s breasts. Lucy was decorous to the point of prudishness. I certainly never saw her naked, although we shared a bedroom. Her dressing and undressing was a deft and skilful business – there was never so much as the flash of a bare limb. The black hole impressed me but I did not find it in any way strange, though I was well aware that my mother did not have one, nor any of the other women I saw frequently in bathing costumes. I simply took it that Lucy was more distinguished anatomically, as she was more distinguished in every other way, so far as I was concerned.

  My father, less adroit than Lucy, once let a bathing towel slip so that for an instant I glimpsed what seemed to be a distinctly odd arrangement around the base of his torso. This did not particularly interest me, but I thought in a detached way that perhaps he had seaweed growing out of him. Again, nothing to wonder at.

  One of the problems with this assemblage of slides in the head is that they cannot be sorted chronologically. All habits are geared towards the linear, the sequential, but memory refuses such orderliness. Without internal evidence of some kind there is no way of knowing what happened when, or what comes before something else. Here, though, there does seem to me to be some distinct internal evidence. It is only very small children – under four or five – who retain this wonderfully surreal vision. It is an anarchic vision, too. They are seeing the world without preconceptions or expectations, and therefore anything is possible. There is no reason why a woman should not have a black hole in the middle of her chest, or a man sprout seaweed from his body. It is the unlicensed vision that later finds its way into kinds of fiction, the fantasy that allows a woman to turn into a tree or a man into a beetle. But this is the sophisticated fantasy that springs from a knowledge of the boundaries of possibility – the child’s view is the very opposite. It arises because of absence of expectation, not a manipulation of what is known.

  Children arrive soon enough at rationality. At some point I no longer saw that black hole; at some point both the hole and the seaweed gave way to an awareness of and curiosity about sexuality. But that original perception lingers as ghostly evidence of another lost capacity.

  Is it, though, entirely lost? I have always found an eerie resonance in the surrealism of dreams. Here again, you walk a landscape in which things are not as they are in the world you know, and yet you suspend disbelief. Nothing is surprising; nothing is impossible. Here is a recent such experience. I am at a social gathering – some bookish gathering. I stand beside a fireplace in which a number of people are lying stacked like logs. They are mainly poets, including several that I know personally. I am talking to a literary editor of my acquaintance. I see that the area around his eyes is covered with flakes of oatmeal, attached to cobwebs, it seems. His eye cavities are also filled with oatmeal. None of this disturbs me, any more than do the stacked poets.

  Some may prefer to interpret this as a view of literary editors, or of poets. I see it simply as a nice instance of the anarchism of dreams – a refreshing escape from the dictation of reality. The only parallel experience seems to be those rare surviving snatches of very early observation, before the view of the world was made for ever inflexible by the impositions of knowledge. I do not of course mean by this that I am against knowledge. Obviously to retain that vision, or any other of these early ways of seeing, would be to be in some way crippled. What seems valuable is the way in which their retention even in such frustratingly incomplete form is perhaps an insight into the way in which children perceive the world.

  Moreover, in this instance the way of seeing provides also a clue to when the seeing was done. The whole package of these momentary views supplies the basic evidence, and the framework, for this book. But it is recalcitrant evidence, because it is untethered. Each item floats free in time, making it impossible to marshal them into any sort of order. The best that can be done is to look at each one and see what it seems to say about how this particular child saw things, and then investigate what it was that she saw. And sometimes it will also be possible to slot each view into a proper chronological place and say – that happened just about then, or then.

  Perhaps I was three when I saw the black hole and the seaweed. Somewhat older when having those thoughts about time at the beginning of the book – six or seven. In both instances the deduction about age is made possible by the internal evidence of the process of thought. Other moments are placeable because of other kinds of evidence – firm historical evidence, sometimes. A great deal was going on at the time, after all, and sometimes it is possible to fix my own glimpse within the historical narrative. In this chapter I want to do just that – take the shards within my head and try to place them within the correct strata. And try to see what light if any this view casts on what I now know was going on.

  I am in the garden of the villa in Alexandria that my mother has rented for the summer. Trench and Walker have come for lunch, and soon we will be going to the beach, to Sidi Bishr. Trench and Walker are naval officers. I find them dashing and sophisticated; I admire them immensely. I am behaving badly, showing off like crazy and uneasily aware that I will catch it from Lucy later on. Someone is taking a photo of us, and I have snatched up the uniform cap of Trench, or of Walker, and put it on.

  And there I am indeed, in the photo, wearing the naval cap, flanked by these two young men in their white drill uniforms. Very young men. Eighteen, they look – twenty at a pinch. I am scowling. An insufferable child, from the look of me.

  Once again, the view of things has a double exposure. I see those two figures twice over – they are of a maturity that is unreachable and impressive, and they are boys. And alongside that double vision there lies the haunting impression of having been told that one or both of them subsequently died in action.

  When eventually I came to write a novel – Moon Tiger – part of which was concerned with the Libyan campaign and wartime Cairo, I found that this superseded vision lurked all the time behind the books that I read and the film and photographs at which I looked. Now, I saw the faces of very young men – boys waving from the backs of trucks, making the V-sign, driving tanks, humping equipment. But there was also that other, equally credible image of an inaccessible maturity. Both views informed the book, in the end.

  By the end of 1941 there were over 140,000 British troops stationed in and around Cairo, and three-quarters of a million in the Middle East. To these were added the Australians, the New Zealanders, South Africans, a scattering of Canadians, Free French, Greeks, Poles – the streets of both Cairo and Alexandria were awash with soldiers, the Delta roads and the desert road from Cairo to Alexandria were jammed with army convoys. This invasion was received with mixed feelings. Those Egyptians whose memories reached back to the First World War and the excesses of some troops, especially the Australians, quailed. Indeed, so fervent were some of these memories that at the outset of the war all Australians were stationed in Palestine, at the insistence of the government. Egypt remained neutral, on the advice of the British government, and while Egyptians were glad to have the Italians kept at bay and ultimately disposed of most were clear that this was not, in the last resort, their war. But the fact remained that its arrival on Egypt’s doorstep transformed the country. An army has to be serviced. From 1940 until British forces finally left North Africa much of the country’s available resources were committed to the supply and maintenance of this huge influx of population and its requirements, with all that that implies. Some grew fat on it; others suffered.

  For the British community it was on the whole a welcome incursion, except in that it was of course accompanied by the possibility of Egypt falling to Rommel. The patriotic duty to receive and entertain the troops was no imposition on people like my parents – it provided a stimulating extension to the social round. Bulaq Dakhrur saw a continuous strea
m of Eighth Army visitors. In the Alexandrian summers my mother enlivened the afternoons at the beach by taking along young naval officers or whoever else was around. I have to say that I cannot remember much entertainment of other ranks. British Cairo retained the rigid social structure it had always known. Officers only were allowed to join Gezira Sporting Club and the Turf Club.

  For Egyptians, this was their first exposure to members of the British working class en masse. For the vast majority of them, the only British they came across were professionals of one kind or another – government officials, engineers, teachers, people working for the oil companies and industrial concerns. Troops had been there in the First World War, of course, but in smaller numbers. Now, they were receiving them in hordes: mostly very young, many of them overseas for the first time in their lives. They too were undergoing cultural shock, and many could not cope, displaying a xenophobia and racialism that perhaps differed only from that of the professional classes in being more explicit and more openly expressed. The only two words of Arabic that most soldiers knew were yalla and imshi – succinct versions of ‘go away’. For many urban Egyptians there were of course rich pickings. A bonanza for the tourist industry, for the shops and cafés, for the street traders and the craftsmen in the Mouski, for the prostitutes of the Birka. For the rest, one can only think that whole experience must have been dismaying, and revealing.

  I was in something of the same position as the average Egyptian. I too had known only one kind of British person. Now I too discovered that English is spoken in many different ways, and that there were apparently mysterious gradations of Englishness which appeared in some perverse way to mirror Lucy’s definition of degrees of non-Englishness. It was bewildering. My previous indoctrination had been that English was an exclusive club. If you spoke English you were a member of the club, and that was the end of it. Now I discovered – slowly and incompetently – that things weren’t quite like that after all. It was more complicated, and bafflingly so. I was quite devoid of the innate social perceptions of any home-bred British child. I had not acquired them by the time I came to England in early adolescence, and was to continue to commit what were seen by my relatives as solecisms and gross errors of judgement.

  The soldiers at the searchlight battery have given me some moths which have been killed by flying into the light. Wonderful moths – some of them several inches across, with wings patterned like rich tapestry. Lucy and I make these moths the subject of our Natural History period, during lessons. We would like to know their names but are frustrated because we have no Egyptian moth book. As an attempt at classification, I try to make crayon drawings of them, and become exasperated because I am so bad at this. My drawings have no bearing at all upon the glowing reality. The searchlight soldiers are nice – it is always a treat to walk over the fields to visit them. Lucy takes them cakes that Hassan has made, and has given each of them one of her housewives.

  Plenty of internal evidence here. This is probably sometime in 1942, before the battle of Alamein. The searchlight battery would not otherwise have been positioned in the fields near Bulaq Dakhrur, where it was presumably part of the Cairo defence system, though the city was never in fact bombed, unlike Alexandria. Also, my preoccupations over the moths show that Lucy has by now turned from nurse into governess, of which much more anon.

  Those manning the searchlight battery were a small group – three or four, I think – leading a solitary life out there in the cultivation, and a leisurely one too for the most part, presumably. Once, Lucy got me up after I had been put to bed to see a plane caught like a firefly in the crossed beams of two searchlights – one of them ours, maybe. She was wildly excited, and wanted to see it shot down: I was surprised and perturbed by this uncharacteristic bloodlust. If there were searchlights there must also have been anti-aircraft guns somewhere not too far away, but I don’t remember either seeing or hearing these. And since there were no raids, what was that plane doing pinned in the beams? A reconnaissance plane, perhaps, or not a German aircraft at all.

  The searchlight soldiers did not form part of those groups drinking whisky and soda on the Bulaq Dakhrur lawn in the dusk, nor of those larky lunchtime bathing parties on the rickety wooden platform with benches alongside our pool. This seemed to me slightly odd – they were after all our neighbours, in a sense. They were English, weren’t they? If ever I queried this omission, I cannot remember the justification. But Lucy and I visited them, bestowing cakes and housewives and receiving in return dead moths and genial chat. One of the soldiers says he has a little girl just my age back at home. I overhear him remark to Lucy that it is a shame, me growing up in a place like this. I am astonished by this comment, and mildly offended.

  A housewife (pronounced hussif), for those mystified, was a sewing-kit constructed out of a length of cloth fitted with pockets in which were tucked scissors, needles and thread, buttons, darning requisites and so forth, which was then rolled up and neatly tied with tapes. Lucy was an excellent seamstress; she made these things in batches and presented them to favoured visitors. My impression of the British army was of a feckless lot forever in trouble with their buttons and their socks.

  Alamein is sixty miles from Alexandria. By the time of the fall of Tobruk and Rommel’s thrust to the Egyptian border and beyond we were that close to the prospect of German occupation. I come now to what seems, in retrospect, one of the more incomprehensible aspects of recollection. It does not seem to me that there was then, or at any other point, any atmosphere of panic, apprehension or even of general unease. It is possible that adult feelings of this kind simply did not filter through to me, or that I was carefully shielded. Somehow, I don’t think that was the case. Children are sensitive to adult anxieties. If adults are abstracted or preoccupied by worry or fear, they know. I don’t remember my parents, or Lucy, being overtly concerned. Life went on just as it always had done. My father went to his office (he had not been able to join up because of extremely poor eyesight); my mother supervised the house and garden, went into Cairo a couple of times a week to shop and go to the Club, and did some mild war work. She helped in the offices of an organization called SSAFA – the Soldiers’, Sailors’ and Airmen’s Family Association, which liaised between members of the armed forces and their families back home, and she visited convalescent troops in the army hospital. I occasionally accompanied her and her friends as they tried to interest these men in something called Occupational Therapy. I distinctly recall embroidery frames and raffia kits – received, one would assume, with some derision. But the war seems to have affected us mainly as an extension of social opportunity, and a vaguely disquieting offstage rumble. I remember jocular speculation: the rumour that Rommel had earmarked Bulaq Dakhrur as a convenient out-of-town headquarters, the assurance that our dogs would be well treated because they were dachshunds.

  It seems a bizarre insouciance, now. In 1942 it must have been apparent to any reasonably shrewd observer that things could go either way, and indeed that a good deal pointed to the imminent fall of Egypt to the advancing German army. Mass raids on Cairo and an aerial invasion like that of Crete were both anticipated in June 1942. Cairo was a hotbed of rumour and gossip, all of which must have meant that official apprehensions of this kind percolated to the rest of the community. And to some extent they undoubtedly did. The wives and families of military personnel had been required to leave for Palestine or South Africa some while before, in August 1940. Some civilian families had gone, but most had not, and nor did they until the fall of Tobruk at the end of June precipitated what was known both then and subsequently as ‘The Flap’. Even the terminology is significant – dismissive and a touch contemptuous. The Embassy and GHQ burned their files till, allegedly, the ash rained down on Cairo. Now at last there was a serious run on the trains to Palestine.

  And about time too, one may think. It is hard to diagnose the sources of what now seems a combination of intransigence and a determination not to face facts. It is an attitude perfectly po
rtrayed in J. G. Farrell’s novel The Singapore Grip, in which the incredulity of the British community in Singapore in the face of the Japanese invasion, and the defiant fiddling as the place began to burn, are seen as a manifestation of imperial confidence. Not only did the sun never set on the Empire, but it was inconceivable that it would ever do so. Well, Egypt was not part of the Empire, but it was very much a part of the global British presence. The behaviour and attitudes of Farrell’s characters reflect for me the general impression that came across to a child in Egypt in what must have appeared the equally hazardous days of the summer of 1942. Which makes Farrell’s fictional achievement the more impressive: he had not been present in Singapore in any incarnation.

  We joined the run for the railway station and the trains to Palestine. And I remember practically nothing. Certainly no sense of panic, nor any suggestion that we might not be coming back. My father remained behind in Cairo. My mother, Lucy and I set off, initially I think in the company of other families, for what seems to have been seen as an unexpected change from the usual summer routine of removal to Alexandria. My mother had made inquiries about pleasant seaside resorts. She was an enthusiastic traveller and had been frustrated the previous year in a whim to go to Cyprus for the summer when it was pointed out by my father that this might not be the most sensible move in 1941. A month or two in Palestine was not seen as any great inconvenience.

  And in the event, of course, two or three months was all that it was, but I cannot see now how anyone can have been so confident at the time.

  I had been in England when war broke out, and would be there again in time for VE day in 1945. In between lay the five most perilous years of the century, and my childhood. Lucy and I were at my grandmother’s home in Somerset in September 1939. In August my grandmother had taken an extended family party to Chamonix in the French Alps – my uncle and his wife, my eldest cousin, a cousin of my mother’s, my mother and Lucy and myself. It seems to have been planned as a final gathering and holiday while the going was good, and in retrospect appears a little misjudged. My father was still in Cairo, my aunt Rachel was in Somerset, receiving bland postcards from my grandmother extolling the scenery and saying how nice it was not to be getting any newspapers, in response to which Rachel fired back telegrams urging immediate scrutiny of the press. I remember collecting wortleberries and pottering a little way up mountains in a pair of real laced-up climbing boots. Eventually Rachel’s telegrams found their mark and we dispersed in haste – my mother in a frenzied dash to Marseilles to try to get a boat to Egypt, the rest of us to England. My grandmother, Lucy and I arrived back in Somerset nicely in time to hear Chamberlain’s speech on the wireless in the solemnity of the drawing-room at Golsoncott, with all the household summoned to sit in silence. Then, and only then, did the sense of adult anxiety reach me. Afterwards, Lucy and I went back up to the nursery and I played the record of ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ on the wind-up gramophone, over and over again: