Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived

by Penelope Lively

  If you go down to the woods today, you’d better go in disguise

  If you go down to the woods today, you’re in for a big surprise.

  The words thumped away in my head, an accompaniment to that portentous and disturbing group in the drawing-room, with a man’s thin dry voice coming from the wireless and all the grown-ups wearing strange expressions. To this day, that tune is loaded with a sense of menace.

  My grandmother immediately embarked on a battle by telegram with my parents. She wanted me to be left in England with her rather than risk the journey back to Egypt. My parents wanted me sent back, and won. Lucy and I set off in a party of British women and children on a complicated trek across Europe by land and sea. And I cannot but reflect, now, that Lucy need not have done this. She could have said, No, I prefer to see this war out in my own country – and handed in her notice. But she didn’t. She took me to London, where we met up with the rest of the little clutch of fleeing expatriates, and embarked on a journey which is reduced for me now to an impression of crowded railway carriages, people talking French, and an abiding worry about the gas-mask which I had to carry and not lose on pain of instant death, or so I understood. And there is also a stubborn and perplexing image of a hotel bedroom with clanking radiators in which I lie and know that I am in Venice. Venice? The straightforward route would seem to have been down through France to Marseilles and thence by boat to Alexandria, a popular alternative to the sea trip from England to Egypt. But this determined inner voice proclaims – Venice. And inquiry reveals that this was indeed the case. Since Italy had not yet come into the war it was thought safer to go by train across France and Switzerland and then by ship down the Adriatic.

  For a child, the world of public events is an irrelevant background clamour. And even when the clamour becomes so insistent as to direct the pattern of daily life, it is still accepted on the whole. It is only later on that we acquire the gall to quarrel with the malevolence of fate, and much good does it do. Children do indeed question the dictation of circumstance – why should I do this, that or the other – but when it comes to the huge manipulations of history they are silent, naturally enough. This is a part of the immutability of things. This is how it goes; there could be no other way. I accepted without surprise the flight down through Europe in October 1939, and the subsequent departure from Cairo to Palestine in June 1942. Both became, simply, part of an inevitable narrative. Except that even the narrative exists only because adult habits of mind impose one. At the time, there was no narrative – just the compelling immediacy of life.

  The war was something which had stolen up and now was like some inescapable element. And yet it carried with it an implied chronology. After the war. When the war is over. My own nightly ritual of prayer suggested both chronology and the possibility of divine intercession: ‘Please God, make the war end soon.’ This I incanted, without examination. Equally, I moved drawing-pins around on the map of the Libyan desert which was stuck up on the wall, and charted the advance and retreat of the Eighth Army. I must have watched the line of drawing-pins creep back towards Cairo.

  To follow now the course of the Western Desert campaign of 1941 and 1942 is to realize the extraordinary accelerated nature of time in war. So much happened so quickly. The initial British advance into Cyrenaica at the end of 1940, the turn of the tide with the arrival of Rommel and the German surge forward, the siege of Tobruk, the second allied offensive and the battle of Sidi Resegh, the renewed German thrust and fall of Tobruk, the battle of Alamein. Within twenty months or so the war had come and gone. It had been on the doorstep, and had then swept away over the horizon, become just a distant unstoppable clamour. But at the time, for those twenty months, it had roared in our ears. Even I had heard it, playing in the garden at Bulaq Dakhrur, walking the streets of Cairo with Lucy, seeing and listening to that khaki-clad horde.

  But what I saw and heard seems nothing much to do with what I now know. Then, they were old and wise. Now they are so young, and I read with incredulity of boys straight from school who went out to train in the Delta and found themselves in the desert within months, commanding Crusader tanks. They must have shot from adolescence to an awful maturity. The language of Keith Douglas’s brief memoir, From Alamein to Zem Zem, reflects something of this precarious fusion of forced sobriety and natural exuberance. He was twenty-two and was to be killed in the Normandy campaign.

  For me, then, the war was not so much a sequence of events as a pervasive fact. And what was happening became fused with its backdrop. The desert. The desert swallowed up these people that I knew – these imposing figures who sprawled on the lawn at Bulaq Dakhrur, or joshed me into believing that there was a catfish in our swimming-pool – and then disgorged them again, weeks later. I knew the desert, of course. It was a place to which you went to have picnics. You drove out into it and searched out an overhang or a depression or somewhere out of the wind and with a shred of shade, and then you spread a rug and got out the Thermoses and sandwiches. I knew favoured spots by name: Wadi Natrun, Wadi Digla. Wadis were best because they were periodic watercourses and so had minimal vegetation and, sometimes, flowers clinging to a crevice in the rocks or springing miraculously from the dry sand. I liked the desert. It was mysterious, apparently endless, and filled with treasure: little succulent plants, strange spiny trees, the trails of snakes and small creatures embroidered upon the sand. The solitary figures of Bedouin trekking along the skyline. Wind-rippled slopes down which you could roll. The desert, for me, meant Marmite sandwiches, milk in a Thermos and rewarding exploration.

  And now the desert had a new significance. For one thing, it was no longer a single, infinite place. I had learned how the infinity out there could be tamed by a piece of paper: I knew what a map meant. I could see the desert in another way, reaching in brown wastes towards Tunisia in one direction and Palestine in the other. Those were the immensities in which the war roared, and into which vanished those I knew. It had become something voracious, and unreliable even in the most immediate sense. We continued to go for desert picnics, in 1940 and 1941 and 1942, but you could no longer go just anywhere. The desert had become vicious, sown with hazards by way of unexploded bombs and ammunition dumps. You could only go to designated safe zones, and even those could betray. A child my own age, the son of acquaintances of my parents, picked up a stick bomb and was fatally injured – an incident used by Olivia Manning in her Cairo trilogy in what seems one of the more insensitive translations of experience into fiction. The chill of this child’s death reached me, in the garden at Bulaq Dakhrur. After that, the picnics in the desert ceased.

  Underneath the house at Bulaq Dakhrur there was a cellar, used as a dump for superfluous objects: broken deck-chairs, my father’s discarded golf-clubs, my old cot. It was a dry, musty place, always visited with caution because probably the haunt of snakes and scorpions. The floor of it, I remember, was sandy, as though the desert had thrust up here, a few feet below the surface of the garden.

  And there, on that thin sand, I stand one day towards the end of the war. We are leaving Bulaq Dakhrur. The cellar is being turned out. Someone – my mother, Lucy – is overseeing the removal and disposal of what was there. This to be thrown out, that to be kept. And there in the corner is a little stack of kit-bags, and a tin trunk with a stencilled name on the lid. The kit-bags too have names, on tattered labels tied to their necks. They are the possessions of those the desert swallowed but did not disgorge. They have never returned to claim the stuff they left here till next time they came. And now no one knows what should be done with these things. They sit there in the corner of the cellar, on the sand, isolated.

  Chapter Four

  We are in the desert, somewhere outside Cairo. My mother has driven us to see what some archaeologists are doing, who are working out here in the middle of nowhere. The archaeologist to whom my mother talks is French. He is offering explanations, to which I do not listen. I see, simply.

  I see a shallow scrape in the s
and, a bowl in which lies in delicate relief a crouched skeletal outline. It is so faint that it seems to melt into the sand, or to be a pattern blown by the wind. There is the curve of the skull, the fan of ribs, the folded limbs. The trace of a hand. Perhaps I do listen to the explanation, with half an ear, because it comes to me as I stare that this is a person. Long, long ago, this was a person. It too saw, and felt, and thought. I stand there enthralled, glimpsing time, and death. I do not know what it is that I have seen, but I understand that it is of significance.

  It was indeed. I have never forgotten. The moment appears seminal, and perhaps accounts for much.

  It now seems to me that what I saw was a pre-Dynastic burial. The precise details of a shallow bowl-like depression with a skeleton lying on its side in a foetal position accord nicely with descriptions of these very early cemeteries, and this one might have dated from any point between 5000 and 3000 B C. Such Neolithic communities lived in village settlements in both Upper and Lower Egypt. The dig we visited cannot have been far from Cairo – it would have been an afternoon excursion, or a day at the most. Possibly it was at the Fayoum, where there are very early pre-Dynastic sites, but the Fayoum is not conspicuously a desert area, and my recollection is very firmly of desert. Other possibilities are Merimda, and Maadi, just beyond Cairo.

  When was this, then? My reactions do not seem to have been those of a very young child, but it would seem odd for archaeological activity of this kind to have been going on in the desert once the war had got going – I feel it cannot have been much later than 1940. So I was six or seven, and able to grasp the idea of immensities of time.

  A necessary perception, in Egypt, but not one which I acquired in anything but the haziest way. My home-based education, administered by Lucy, was rigidly structured around books and a timetable supplied from England. Neither the system nor Lucy were flexible enough to take advantage of what lay all around us. When I see droves of primary school children in the Egyptian Hall of the British Museum these days, armed to the teeth with clipboards and notepads, I realize that they are far better informed than ever I was, growing up in the midst of it all. We visited the Pyramids and the Sphinx at least every couple of weeks, but the purpose of this, so far as I was concerned, was not to pay attention to antiquity but to have a donkey-ride and – essential, this – be allowed to choose my own donkey from the array on offer alongside the approach road to the Great Pyramid. This was effectively a taxi rank, but without any such niceties as taking the front donkey in the line. It was, rather, a process of jostling negotiation with all the donkey men in competition, and the donkeys tricked out in seductive finery – tassels, braided harness, upholstered saddles, strings of beads; brilliant in scarlet, orange, cerise, purple, turquoise. The criterion of selection, for me, was a combination of splendour of décor and the quality of the donkey itself. You were looking for as much as possible by way of tassels and beads and braiding and so forth, along with compelling personal charm. Small was preferable, dark brown fur best of all, and facial features significant – long silky eyelashes, velvet muzzle. I would spin out the process of choice for as long as possible, patrolling the line like some connoisseur of horseflesh at a bloodstock sale. The donkeys were all called Chocolate, Whisky-and-Soda or Telephone. There was a camel line also, but I was not interested in camels. Too high, and they lurched alarmingly as they rose and made those terrible groaning noises.

  It was all going on, last time I went back, very much the same – the donkey lines, the trappings, the beseeching drivers. There they all were. But the lustre was gone. I saw a line of dressed-up donkeys, and turned soberly to the Pyramids.

  Then, the Pyramids were neither here nor there. I had grown up with Pyramids. A Pyramid was a Pyramid. There they were, rearing starkly against the sky, dotted with tiny climbing figures. There was a certain interest attached to the climbers. Just possibly you might see one of them fall off, and the various methods of ascent were worth watching, with most climbers attended by a couple of hired guides one of whom pulled from above while the other heaved in the rear, their galabiyas flapping in the wind. Each limestone block was several feet high; only the extremely athletic could cope without some assistance. But the pyramids themselves, as structures, were simply a part of the known and accepted world. When I first saw the Pyramids as an adult, I saw a preconception – they carried now a freight of association and knowledge, they resounded of the Napoleonic expedition, and Flaubert (who climbed the Great Pyramid), and imprecise but dizzying facts and figures about bulk and construction. They could no longer be seen as themselves, but only through the prism of all that went with them. And the climbing figures had gone, which seemed somehow appropriate, along with the irretrievable allure of the donkey lines.

  The Pyramids were the backcloth to the donkey lines and also to Mena House Hotel, where you had lemonade and ice-creams. Mena House survives, kitted out for the late twentieth century with a new extension but retaining its original building, a bizarre architectural combination of Moorish with stockbroker Tudor. Then, it implied a dazzling stylishness with the prospect of a stupefyingly good tea. We had lunch at Mena House on that first return visit to Egypt. It seemed to me no longer stylish but wonderfully odd, its original architecture a confection of ill-assorted influences which now looked a lot braver and more sprightly than the modern extension slapped down alongside. I saw it as a building, and the building in terms of its peculiar inspirations; the lunch was adequate but did not stupefy.

  I assessed Cairo and its surroundings with the egotistic eye of childhood. What was there here for me? It is a view that is egotistic and also acquisitive, one that is in search of relevance. It ignores or discards all that is apparently of no interest, and homes in upon anything worth having. And what is worth having ranges from the luxurious choice of a donkey through such immediate and obvious targets as a memorable tea to those sights and sounds and smells which are for some indefinable reason of personal significance. What remains of it all, now, are those points of personal reference: my private map of the place.

  At either side of the bridge over the river there are big trees. And to these trees, in the evenings, come the white egrets. They come in great wavering flocks, arriving out of the apricot sky in drifting skeins until the trees are studded all over with white, as though they had suddenly burst into bloom. And under the trees is a pungent compost of droppings. You can smell it from halfway across the bridge.

  And I can still smell it, in a curious subliminal way. I could not describe the smell, but it is somehow there in the head – the shadow of a smell. And I know too that the egrets were the Little Egret, which stalked the fields of the cultivation all day. It would have been from there that they came flocking back each evening to these roosts. But the bridge I cannot identify. Zamalek Bridge? Bulaq Bridge? The English Bridge? Khedive Ismail Bridge? All those names are familiar, a part of the litany of the place, and all are on the maps of Cairo in the 1930s though most are gone now, swept away in deference to the universal insistence that the major landmarks of a city must reflect its recent history: 26th July Bridge now, and El Tahrir Bridge. It will be all the same to the egrets, that’s for sure, if their roosts haven’t been swept away too.

  It is that litany of names which haunts me still. Gezira. Zamalek. Qasr el Nil. Qasr el Aini. El Ezbekiya. Ibn Tulun. The Beit el Kritiliya. But there is something awry, seeing these words in print. And what is awry, I realize, is that they should be in cold print at all. They were sounds, not sequences of letters on a page. I knew them before I could read, or write, and knew them thus in the way that children first know words – as recognizable sounds surfacing from the babble which bombards them. And because for more than fifty years these particular words have lain dormant in my head, I can hear them again now with that inner ear – as pure language floating free of the complications of writing or of spelling. To see them on the page is a shock.

  On that first return to Egypt, as an adult, other dormant words floated to the
surface. Arabic words and phrases. I would find that somehow I knew what an apricot tree was called. A mish-mish. And an accompanying phrase rose to the lips: ‘Bukra fil mish-mish,’ which means roughly, ‘Tomorrow never comes.’ The sort of thing, perhaps, that Abdul and Hassan said, on the kitchen steps. ‘Maalesh,’ I found myself saying – never mind. And a dozen other homely utterances that came swarming up, things I didn’t know I knew. Once, I must have had a smattering of Arabic. An odd feeling – again as though you tapped in to some inaccessible bank of information. I have never undergone psychoanalysis, but I imagine that in a more disconcerting way that is similar: the discovery of concealed experience.