Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived

by Penelope Lively

  Greek was the lady in the grocery near the villa we had one summer in Alexandria, a black-clad mountain topped with a beaming face and liquid dark kindly eyes, who gave me sweets in a twist of paper. And the girl behind the ribbon counter at Cicurel, who tipped Lucy off when there had been a delivery of interesting new stock, and who had the same fathomless eyes. Lebanese was those mysterious daughters of Nunn’s, and Syrian was the nurse with a cloud of dark hair who looked after the children of friends of my parents, and whose methods sent Lucy into a frenzy of pursed lips and muttered asides. Turkish was Turkish Delight and the big carpet in the drawing-room. Church of England was the cathedral where we went for the Christmas carol service and christenings of other people’s babies and where I had apparently been christened myself. Muslim was the minarets and the muezzin’s call and the gardeners upended at their prayers in a shady bit of the garden and Ramadan when nobody could eat till evening, which made them irritable and volatile and so required tact and forbearance.

  Coptic was mysterious. Coptic had an aura which I could not identify but of which I was definitely conscious. And this I now realize is where in some random and maverick way I homed in unknowing upon the chronology of the country. Here and there, over the months and years, as I grew up, aspects of the place meshed crucially and unforgettably with my own life. I didn’t know what it was I saw or heard or failed to understand, but I never forgot.

  Every Christmas there was a carol service at the cathedral which was known as the Toy Service. The point of it was that all attending children should donate a toy, which would be given to the families of poor Copts. You carried your toy up the aisle, at the end of the service, and deposited it on a pile at the feet of the benignly smiling bishop while the congregation crooned carols. You were done up to the nines for the occasion – party frock, white socks, Cicurel hair-ribbon. I loathed and detested the whole event, on account of the party frock and the socks, and because I couldn’t sing, and most of all because of the toy donation. You could not give any old toy; it had to be something you were especially fond of. I argued passionately over this. Why? What difference could it possibly make to the poor Coptic children whether it was a favourite toy or not? Why could I not give them the doll given me by a visitor which was brand-new, had real hair, eyes that shut and a pink net dress but about which I was unenthusiastic? Lucy was implacable. It was the element of sacrifice that mattered. And so, every year I stumped sullenly up the aisle clutching some beloved hairless teddy, or wall-eyed doll. I like to think that my present agnosticism is the product of informed and intelligent reflection, but I suspect that the seeds may have been sown back then, when I was coerced annually into irrational sacrifice to the strains of ‘Away in a Manger’.

  But what reached me also, over and beyond all the negative elements of the Toy Service, was the specialness of Copts. Copt meant good. Copt meant élite, in some mysterious way. I must have realized that Copts were Christians, as I was supposed to be myself. But there was more to it than that, and I now realize that the further element was the respect accorded to the Coptic community as the only surviving element of pre-Islamic Egypt, the oldest Egyptians of all, the descendants of the Egypt of Rome, of Greece, of the Pharaohs. There was undoubtedly a doctrinal element in this respect, as enshrined in the Toy Service and vague admonitions of Lucy’s. But Lucy knew little of and was not interested in the Egyptian past. There was some further way in which the Copts were distinguished, nothing to do with being Christian; this seeped through to me, and I can now identify it. It was the sanctity of ancestry.

  And, in the same way, I recognized other things as phenomenal but inexplicable. The wall-paintings in the tombs at Saqqara, which showed scenes that were exotic and yet familiar: strangely clad figures, but also the birds and animals and plants of the Nile landscape that I knew. The great mosques – Ibn Tulun and Sultan Hassan. The Beit el Kritiliya. The Citadel. Each in turn served as a backdrop for my own self-absorbed existence, but was also in some way impenetrable, teasing and enticing. And this surely was an effect of the process whereby children learn to perceive the restrictions of their state. They are self-absorbed, and confined by their self-absorption as well as by the obvious fetter of ignorance, but there are sudden chinks in the self-absorption, and sudden glimpses of the very nature of ignorance.

  There is one final and apt occasion in my head when the continuities of the place were fused with what was happening to me, and with what I felt and understood.

  I have been taken out for the afternoon by a friend of my father’s, a man I have never met before, who has come from Khartoum, where my father is now working. He has taken me to the museum. We look at the things from Tutankhamun’s tomb. He explains them to me, in a grown-up way, as though I were older than I am. I stand looking at the great gold mask, at the chariot, at the sarcophagus, and am filled with a confused solemnity. Lucy is not with us. I am alone with this stranger whose name and face have subsequently faded away but who hangs over the afternoon as a kindly presence, concerned about me in a way that I cannot identify. I sense his concern, and the fact that I am spotlit in some way, affected as though ill, and that this man is like a doctor, perturbed about an ailment of which I do not feel the symptoms.

  Lucy is not with us because my parents are getting divorced, and this is the afternoon of the court hearing, at which her presence is required. All this has been explained to me, partly by Lucy and partly by my mother. I know too that Lucy and I are going soon to England, for ever, and that I will live first with my grandmothers – going from one to the other – and then later with my father, when he comes from Khartoum.

  I know all this, but passively. I do not know what to do with these facts. They hang above the glass cases in the museum, above the mask, above the jewellery, which are more immediate. I know only that things are out of the ordinary, and that I feel solemn, and vaguely important.

  I was eleven. Lucy had to be at the court hearing to give evidence as to my mother’s adultery. My mother had been living for some while with a man she had met a year or so before – an army officer – and my father had agreed to a divorce. He would be granted custody of me, which my mother had not requested. Lucy would take me back to England, where my father would find us a home and me a boarding school as soon as he could wind up his affairs in the Sudan.

  Back then, divorce was not the commonplace happening that it is today. It carried a stigma. I had heard the word – as one uttered by grown-ups in a particular tone, a mysteriously loaded word. Lucy and I had been living for some while cheek by jowl with my mother’s new domestic arrangements, and were offended by them. Our reaction had been to withdraw into our private enclave. We tried to ignore my mother and her companion, and they steered clear of us.

  Thinking about it all now, I see that I was in a sense cushioned from the effect of divorce by the distance that there had always been between my mother and myself. The fact that she was now, in effect, discarding me along with my father was not as shattering as it would be for a child for whom a mother is the crucial figure. I would still have Lucy, who was far more important to me. It would be Lucy who would take me to England. It never occurred to me that I would have to lose Lucy also, eventually. And in the event I was not to see my mother again for two years, after we left Egypt, by which time I was someone else.

  I do not know who the kindly friend of my father’s was who took me to the museum that day, but my father subsequently wrote to Lucy that he had reported of that afternoon that I was charming and very nicely behaved. I was much gratified by this; nobody had ever said such a thing before. And when, years later, I saw the Tutank-hamun treasures again, the immediacies were reversed: the mask and the chariot sank away and the portentous atmosphere of that afternoon came flooding back.

  Chapter Five

  I did not go to school in Egypt. I could have done – there were English schools, but they were in Cairo so there would have been a problem about transport. For whatever reason, school was never pro
posed and at some point, without fuss, Lucy turned herself from nurse into governess. This now seems to me a bold and indeed valiant move. I don’t think that she herself had had much, if any, secondary education. She wrote an exemplary copperplate hand, was competent with figures and a keen reader, but that was about it. What she did was to discover the organization which exactly catered for those in our situation. Possibly my parents had a hand in it, but my feeling is that they did not. I don’t remember either of them being involved or indeed taking a great deal of interest in my lessons. It was Lucy, all the way, and the organization upon which she lit was the Parents National Educational Union – the PNEU.

  The PNEU was, and still is, both a system and a philosophy of education. It ran schools in England, but it also offered a sort of do-it-yourself education kit to expatriate parents. The child was signed up with the PNEU centre, and then the timetables, the books and expansive instructions on how to administer them were dispatched at intervals. I have some of this material in front of me now – Form III (A & B), ages 11 to 18. Pupil’s name: Penelope (IIIB). April 1944. I was just eleven, so evidently we were keeping up nicely. The PNEU’s credo is magisterial: ‘Children are born persons. They are not born either good or bad, but with possibilities for good and for evil. The principles of authority on the one hand, and of obedience on the other, are natural, necessary and fundamental…’ Straight Rousseau – and it continues along the same lines.

  The PNEU motto is ‘Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life’… We hold that the child’s mind is no mere sack to hold ideas; but is rather, if the figure may be allowed, a spiritual organism, with an appetite for all knowledge… children should be taught, as they become mature enough to understand such teaching, that the chief responsibility which rests on them as persons is the acceptance or rejection of ideas.

  All very high-minded. Reading it now, I wouldn’t quarrel with many of the sentiments, even if the language seems a touch sententious. The philosophical synopsis continues by outlining the system which was the cornerstone of the PNEU method – the telling-back process.

  As knowledge is not assimilated until it is reproduced, children should ‘tell back’ after a single reading or hearing: or should write on some part of what they have read. A single reading is insisted on, because children have naturally a great power of attention; but this force is dissipated by the rereading of passages, and also, by questioning, summarizing, and the like.

  Lucy read: I told back and, when older, wrote back. I see now what a luxurious educational process it was. Short on expertise, perhaps, but rich in that crucial element – one-to-one attention. Lucy may have been under-qualified, but I had all of her, every day. Together we applied ourselves to the requirements of the PNEU.

  The timetable astonishes me. It is chopped up into twenty-minute periods (ah – that natural power of attention…) and covered the mornings only, six days a week. Formal teaching was a half-day process, then. Probably the idea was that the afternoons would be devoted to sport or organized games, also high on the PNEU agenda; in our case, needless to say, this went by the board. In the afternoons I played in the garden while Lucy sat under a tree and knitted. Or, on star occasions, we went into Cairo. The timetable begins each day with Old Testament or New Testament, except for Wednesdays, which shot off at a tangent into Natural History. Even now I find that Wednesday has a slightly raffish feel. Fridays began with Picture Study. The PNEU sent coloured reproductions of famous pictures, two or three per term, and we studied them. I remember an interior by Jan Steen, and a Romney portrait, and a Gainsborough. Picture Study had us baffled, I’m afraid. Neither Lucy nor I knew quite what we were supposed to do. Eventually, having studied the Jan Steen and the rest into the ground we tacitly agreed to turn Friday into a reading period.

  We read the Bible from end to end. Well, not quite. Lucy had her own ideas about what was appropriate so we skipped Leviticus and Numbers and Chronicles and indeed much of the Old Testament. Formally, at any rate – but I certainly dipped into it on my own, partly in search of that stuff about issues of blood and nakedness that had Lucy running for cover, but also because I liked all those catalogues of names, those sonorous injunctions, that language. When I look at the King James Version now it is resonantly familiar. Those rhythms and cadences are ingrained somewhere deep within me. By the time I was in my early twenties I knew that I was an agnostic, which presumably – and ironically – stemmed at least in part from that early emphasis in training for responsibility in the acceptance or rejection of ideas. Intensive exposure to the King James Version did not make me a Christian, but it gave me a grounding in the English language for which I am profoundly grateful. And when I see the pallid replacements favoured by the Church of England today – the New International Bible and the deplorable Good News Bible – I am amazed, and saddened.

  Arithmetic featured strongly in the timetable. Every day, except when Geometry was suggested as an alternative. This was a tricky area. We had the books, which supplied the problems and indeed the answers at the back, but they were short on explanation. Sooner or later we reached the summit of Lucy’s own education in basic mathematics, and after that we were on our own. It was a question of grimly working through the syllabus, page by page, and hoping that I would get the answers to the exercises right because if I hadn’t then we would have to set to and find out why, which could be a taxing process. Geometry had a certain appeal because of the technical grandeur of the protractor and the compasses, but we were floundering, and knew it. And I remember that eventually Algebra appeared, and had us well and truly floored from the word go. Guiltily, we abandoned it and settled for an overkill of long division, which I could manage.

  Friday, third period: Plutarch’s Lives. Surely not? But even as I look askance at this item on the timetable there floats into the head a vestigial memory. A small green book. Stories in it. No pictures. A reaction that seems neutral, which is perhaps why the only identifying detail is the colour of the book. Evidently I was not seized by Plutarch’s Lives. And indeed I can see why, having looked at Plutarch recently, for quite other reasons. Unless this small green digest had managed somehow to enliven those stern narratives it is hard to see how they would grab an eleven-year-old. A curious choice on the part of the PNEU.

  Citizenship, equally so. Wednesdays, straight after the lush indulgence of Natural History. But I remember Citizenship very well. Again, for negative reasons. If we were leery about Geometry and Algebra, Citizenship had us completely fazed. There was once more the accompanying book. But its prose was impenetrable and it talked of things neither of us could follow at all. It was dealing I think with the history of Parliament – certainly there was a picture of Big Ben somewhere. No doubt it was a supportive text to Our Island Story, that defiant patriotic tract, but where Our Island Story was all sound and fury, the citizenship book plunged into a morass of allusion, and brandished words we did not understand. We had to keep reaching for the dictionary. There was a chapter about something called a Witan. Even the dictionary abandoned us here. Years later, I had to write an essay at university about Anglo-Saxon government, and there again was the Witan. For an instant, I was back in the nursery at Bulaq Dakhrur, glowering at that uncooperative book. Which we presently consigned to the bottom of my desk, in another of those tacit acts of collusion.

  Repetition, every day. Repetition: Poem. Repetition: Bible. Repetition: Week’s Work. Learning by heart, we called it. I could still, if required, declaim a good deal of the beginning of Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, and, back then, did so constantly. While pelting up and down the drive on my bike, or to enliven the after-lunch rest time, lying on my bed in vest and knickers: ‘Lars Porsena of Clusium, by the nine gods he swore…’ And chunks of Genesis and tracts of the Psalms and the whole of St Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians, Chapter 13. And arbitrary swathes of poetry: ‘Swiftly walk o’er the western wave, Spirit of Night!…’ ‘Abou ben Adam (may his tribe increase!)…’ James Elroy Flec
ker. Rupert Brooke. Oscar Wilde, for heaven’s sake. The choices were maverick and had little to do with the PNEU, I suspect, and much more with what happened to be on my parents’ bookshelves because Lucy suffered from a continuous shortfall of equipment. The books were sent out from England by the PNEU, and they frequently failed to arrive, along with other rather more vital wartime supplies. So we fell back on what was available, which accounts for some of the more esoteric areas of my reading. Somerset Maugham. The plays of Noël Coward. When we ran out of the material advocated by the PNEU, we simply read anything that came to hand, rather than not read at all. And the PNEU said, ‘Learn by heart’ so learn by heart I did. Anything, pretty well.

  I don’t remember objecting in the least. Word-perfect, you had to be, and that became a matter of pride. I suppose that as a system it was an educational anachronism, but I have a soft spot for it. I relish, now, those eclectic mental furnishings, apparently indestructible.

  Science featured three times only on the timetable, as Natural History, Botany and General Science. I strongly suspect now that General Science went to the bottom of the Mediterranean, because there is no accompanying vision whatsoever. But Natural History and Botany are vivid. This was our favourite area by far. The Natural History textbook was by one Arabella Buckley, and was called Eyes and No Eyes. It was about the flora and fauna of the English pond and stream and it had colour plates in which the different things illustrated were identified by letters – a, b, c, d. For some reason I was immensely struck by this scholarly touch. I revered Arabella Buckley, and pored over the text and the plates. I would then descend upon the garden ditch, armed with net and jam jar, and pursue my own scholarship. The catch was frequently disconcerting, and not at all like the inhabitants of Arabella Buckley’s genteel Devon waters. Caddis fly? Water boatman? Never mind – it was science, and I was doing it.